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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Christina Harris

Plum Pudding and Things We Believe

Like Esther said, my name is Christina Harris and I'm at Weimar Institute.

I'm a chemistry, my PhD is in organic chemistry and I'm the chair of the natural science department at Weimar Institute.

This is my seventh year there and I enjoy teaching.

And the title of my talk this evening is plum pudding and things we believe or things we believed.

It depends on how you want to think about it.

I try to make it where it's understandable to most people so I hope you are able to follow.

So this is a picture of a man named JJ Thompson and he is the 1 that's credited with discovering the electron.

And he won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1906 for this discovery that he made in 1897.

And so it's right near the turn of the going into the 1900s and can you remember when Darwin's book that he wrote on the the 1 that we when he wrote that's so famous?

Origin of species and that when was that written.

So that's interesting that we didn't even know there was an electron when he made those proposals.

And then you think of all the things we've learned about science since that time, they were still figuring things out.

They didn't even know what the structure of DNA was when he proposed that, made that proposal of how things came about for origins.

And so it's kind of interesting to see how much farther we've come since then.

And if you were going to think about the size of an electron if you had a penny and a bowling ball That's the relative Ratio between an electron and the proton the protons are where out in the molecule.

I mean in an atom Yeah, they're in the they're in the middle in the nucleus and the electrons are on the outside.

So the proton is much, much bigger and J.J.

Thompson even said, he said, could anything at first sight seem more impractical than a body which is so small, talking about the electron, that its mass is an insignificant fraction, 1 3, 000th, of the mass of an atom of hydrogen, which is essentially a proton.

And so you would think that that sounds pretty impractical, but actually electrons govern how molecules react.

They're really small, but they're 1 of the more important parts, although you need all parts.

And then you can think about, you could have said, could anything so small make a difference?

But actually, something that small could.

You can think of some other impractical sounding things that have happened in Earth's history.

God sent his son in the form of a baby that would come and grow up and suffer and die and rise again and save all that would come to him.

And so that seems like something small couldn't make a difference, but it made a huge difference in our eternal life.

So although the electron looks like it's insignificant, they actually govern the reactivity of atoms.

So if you look up on the screen, there's sodium on the left side in the first atom, and you can see the little red dot that's there.

That's an extra electron that it has, and it's all by itself in 1 of the shells.

And so that electron gets given away, because atoms like to have an octet.

They like to have 8 electrons in the outer shell and if you look there, there's the red dot and then around it there are the blue ones and if you count on the last shell out there are 8 and that's an octet.

You can remember it's an octet because there were 8 people in the arc.

And then so the sodium has to, it gives up that extra electron that it has.

And then if you look at the chlorine, chlorine has 7 on the outer, outermost shell and it takes an electron and then it's got an octet and it's complete at that time.

So sodium gives up an electron, chlorine takes 1 and when that happens you get sodium chloride.

And when we start to follow God, I know this was true for me, there were some things that God wanted me to give up so that I could be complete in Him.

We might have to give up some bad habits.

We might have to give up some distorted thoughts.

We might have to give up bitterness or pride or anger in order for us to be complete in Him.

And then sometimes He wants to give us something before we can be complete in Him.

He might want to give us some correction.

He might want to give us some instruction in doing His will.

And so we take what we need to take and we give away to him what we need to give away and then we can be complete in him and that's something I see there is then you can think salt Jesus says you are the Salt of the earth right When we give God what we need to give him and we take what he wants to give us, we can become the salt, just like sodium chloride does.

When it gives up an electron, the sodium, the chlorine takes an electron, then it becomes complete and it's the salt of the earth.

Now what happens when you dissolve salt in water?

Which of the 2 glasses up here has salt in it?

So you can't see salt when it's dissolved in water and it's kind of like it's hidden Christ.

When we are the salt of the earth and we're hidden Christ who's the water of life, we're just like that salt solution.

We're hidden Christ And that's what he wants us to be.

He says, for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ and God.

And so if God can work through an electron, he can work through me.

I might think I'm insignificant or I can't make a difference, but God makes a difference with the electron he can make a difference with me.

So that's 1 of the things that was probably a disbelief for me something so small can't make a difference that's why I called it things we believed or maybe it's things we believe it depends.

Okay so I guess I should have Sodium loses an electron to become complete.

Chlorine gains an electron to become complete.

OK, and then the truth, when we find out, when we have those things in our mind that we think are true that are not really true, we go to scripture in order to find out what that says.

And 1 of them in John 14, he says, assuredly I say to you, he who believes in me, the works that I do he will also do, and greater works than these he will do.

Because I go to my Father, and whatever you ask in my name, that will I do." So God can work in us because it's him.

We can do something if we're insignificant because it's what God does in us.

And then in Desire of Ages, it says, all who will go to work, trusting not in what they themselves can do, but in what God can do for and through them, will certainly realize the fulfillment of this promise.

The secret of their success would be in asking for strength and grace in his name.

So thankfully, God keeps working in us, and he works for us, and he works through us, and I notice sometimes for me, he even works in spite of me and we can be grateful that he can do that in us.

Okay So now we get to the plum pudding part and plum pudding doesn't even look like pudding really.

I don't really care for it and it's not really plums, it's supposed to be raisins or it's what I read.

So but back in the 1800s they had this idea of what the atom looked like.

Thompson proposed this model and he said that an atom was like this big ball.

And if you were to look at the plum pudding on the left-hand side there, it's got all this positive charge.

And then in it are these little plums or raisins which are electrons that are spread evenly throughout and that was his proposal so you have all the plus charge just uniform throughout and then an electron in the middle.

Okay and then he proposed this when he wrote it and submitted it to the journal that he published it in.

He wrote the atoms of the elements consist of a number of negatively electrified corpuscles, those are the electrons, enclosed in a sphere of uniform positive electrification that would be the protons so sounds really complicated but that's what he proposed now after him comes another man whose name is Ernest Rutherford.

Ed Rutherford comes along, he's also a physicist slash chemist and he does some more experiments and he discovers the alpha particle and the beta particle and he gets the Nobel Prize for those discoveries in the early 1900s.

But what's interesting is that wasn't his biggest discovery.

They gave him the Nobel Prize for finding those particles and some of his work with radioactivity.

But his greatest contribution was still in the future.

And he would continue on to discover the atomic nucleus and the neutron together with Chadwick and the neutron opened up a whole new world of chemistry as far as nuclear energy.

It's got the the solid positive charge with a few negative charges in it and then on the right you can see Ernest Rutherford.

He comes up with this another model and here are their 2 models right here.

So Thompson on top and Rutherford proposes there's a nucleus in the middle that's full of positive charge and where most of the mass of the atom is that.

He had an experiment that he did that showed that.

But they were just basing these ideas that they had on the knowledge they had at the time.

And then Rutherford comes along, and he does an experiment here.

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Plum Pudding and Things We Believe

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