What Is Atom in a General Sense?

Atom is something that has no substructure. This means other things can be expressed in terms of atoms but they cannot be expressed of something smaller than them. The atoms of physical bodies are quarks and leptons. An electron is an elementary particle that does not have a substructure. However, a proton is made of three quarks.

One can find atoms in all walks of life. The atoms of a society are human beings. They exist in the form of families. Families then form societies. Such structure is called hierarchal. At each level atoms are unbreakable. The hierarchy can be expressed in the following chain:

Quarks/leptons –> atoms –> molecules –> biological structure –> families –> societies.

Numbers also come in the form of atoms. Multiplicatively prime numbers are atoms. Every large number can written as a product of primes smaller than the given number. On the other hand, there are no smaller numbers whose product produces a prime number. The atom of additive number theory is 1. Every positive integer can be obtained by adding 1’s. That is

1 = 1, 1+1 = 2, 1+1+1 = 3, 1+1+1+1 = 4, etc.

This gives a privileged role 1 over primes. There are infinitely many primes. It becomes harder and harder to find them as the numbers become very large. But there is one and one 1 that can be used to obtain any positive integer by adding 1 to itself successively