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Comment by nanofortnight | Hacker News Reader

That's exactly it. Atom comes from atomos, meaning indivisible; if you take the literal meaning, it has no constituent parts.

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But that's pretty unreasonable as a line of argument; the derivation of a word from a long dead language has no bearing on the semantic in modern discourse. Atoms have been known to be divisible for over 100 years, the consequences of this knowledge are everywhere in our society!

It was in modern usage prior to being adopted in chemistry, it isn't just the derivation.

But that's just the point, instead of using a new word for atoms when sub particles were discovered, the existing meaning was set aside.

we still use atomic to mean indivisible in the context of concurrent programming, and the broader concept of atomicity is used in the same sense. the physical atom is the real edge case here; it just happens to have captured the attention of the general public.

It's not unreasonable because everyone understands the state things are in. Once upon a time atom was meant to be descriptive, and time has proven that original description insufficient. We could call atoms something else to address this, but it seems like we've decided "atom" stays, its meaning has just evolved over time in specific usages.

This reminds me of how the prefixes we use in computing hardware aren't right either. Your PC might have 8 gigabytes of RAM, but it doesn't literally have 8,000 megabytes or 8 billion bytes, and the same problem with mega- and kilo- too. Somehow we manage and when we're talking gigawatts giga means 10^9, and when we're talking gigabytes in computing we know it has a special meaning, 2^30.

Same prefix, two different usages depending on context. The only thing I can promise you though is we're never going to adopt gibi, mebi and kibi, at least not in my lifetime anyway.

Understanding the history and evolution can be interesting or informative as to why things are the way they are. So yeah, one upon a time "sub-atomic" would make no sense, it makes sense not of course. We're familiar and used to the idea. Wasn't always the case though.

but thing is we called it that because we thought there was nothing smaller than a atom.. although there is something smaller.

atoms are made of protons neutrons and electrons each which is made of 3 quantoms.

Same with universe, we think it encompasses everything but according to our current definition it might now.

I think it's commonly held that an entities Universe is everything that has or could physically interact with that entity. So, everything that is out of the light cone for you is external to your universe.

And similarly, we called it a universe because nothing observable can be outside it. Unless...

The analogy is quite apt, really, just switching out bigness in place of smallness.

> atoms are made of protons neutrons and electrons each which is made of 3 quantoms.

Electrons are currently thought to be indivisible, and protons and neutrons are made of three quarks each.

I've never heard of the word "quantom" before... where does it come from?

An etymological physics argument is new!

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