• Question: what does nuclear mean in latin

    Asked by to Becky, Clara, Daniel, Simon, Thomas on 13 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Thomas Elias Cocolios

      Thomas Elias Cocolios answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      “Nuclear” comes from “nucleus”, which is a biology term that designs the central part of a cell. And yes, as surprising as it may sound, it was a term in biology first!

      That term comes from the latin ‘nux’, which means ‘inner part’.

      We actually refer to the ‘nucleus of the atom’, to be accurate, which is why the term was taken from the biology concept.

    • Photo: Becky Martin

      Becky Martin answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      Nuclear comes from the Latin word Nucleus, which means kernel and is derived from “nux” which literally translates as “nut”. 🙂

    • Photo: Simon Albright

      Simon Albright answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      Just read Thomas’ answer, I didn’t know that, pretty cool 🙂

    • Photo: Clara Nellist

      Clara Nellist answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      There’s not really much I can add to what Thomas and Becky have said here about the word ‘nucleus’, so I’ll tell you a cool fact about the word ‘atom’.

      Atom comes from the latin ‘atomus’ which came from the greek word ‘atomos’ and means indivisible, or cannot be divided. This is because they originally thought that atoms were the smallest things around. We then found out that they are made up of protons and neutrons with electrons around the outside. A bit later we found out that protons and neutrons are actually made up of three quarks! At the moment, we think that quarks are the smallest things around and cannot be divided, but who knows? We’ve been wrong before! Maybe there’s something *even* smaller that we haven’t found yet.

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