By now, hopefully, everyone knows what is an atom. So, I am going to leave out all the basic stuff, like atoms consists of neutrons, protons and electrons... No! Wait, I can't just bypass the basic stuff because of all the inaccurate information that is out there and the lack of depth in public school system physics/chemistry. First of all, the building blocks of everything we see, even us, everything is made out of atoms. Atoms are small, really small, so small that it would take about trillion of them laid end to end just to cover the diameter of the dot at the end of this sentence.
So we have now established that an atom (not hydrogen, bacause it only consists of one proton and electron) is build from neutrons that have no charge, protons that have a positive charge and the infamous negatively charged electrons. These are the basic building blocks of atoms, however, protons and neutrons made of still smaller parts called quarks, protons and neutrons are made of three quarks... every quark has its own "direction" or "frequency" that makes it what it is. Now we truly are in the quantum world, so lets stop here.
What's weird, is that atoms are, well damn, EMPTY! The volume of an atom (roughly 1 angstrom, or 10^-10 m in diameter) is about 15 orders of magnitude larger than the volume of a nucleon (roughly 1 fm, or 10^-15 m in diameter). It seems rather silly to express that ratio in percentage, but it would be 99.9999999999999% (13 nines after the decimal point). Of course, the radius of a nucleon is not an absolute figure, since there really is no concept of "radius" in quantum mechanics. So, 1 femtometer is a reasonable value. If you're wondering whether anyone has gone out and made a more precise measurement of the size of a nucleon, the answer is no: there's really no such thing as a precise measurement of the size of a nucleon. It is too uncertain ;)
Why is it, that we don't just collapse and fall through the ground, what holds us together. Love, could one say... and actually that's not so far from the truth, now I am not talking about the love between two persons, I am talking about the "love" between the atoms and the nucleus of the atom. Like two characters in love, they want to be near each other, want to share their space with each other, despite the friction that sometimes occur the attraction is still very strong. Atoms are the same, they are "forced" together by two forces, one is what binds atoms together and one keeps the nucleus together. What keeps the atoms together is the Pauli exclusion principle, it explains why electrons have the "orbits" they do, why there are can only be 2 electrons in the first orbit and what is the reason for that (I will post some more detailed stuff about the Pauli exclusion principle some other time), but the short story is, because of the "frequencies" or the "propability wave" and likes... so the fact that we don't fall apart is because the fundamental laws in physics, no one thing can occupy the same space and time, and what's more important to know, is that the "precise" seem to be equal to the impossible in the quantum theory, in our reality as well, it seems. If we would just fall through the ground because of the empty space in atoms, then it would mean that we would know the precise place, speed and energy of the given atoms, too precisely. This is then direct violation of quantum machanics and the uncertainty principle AND it would negate the pauli exclusion principle.
There would have been so much more that I would have loved to tell about... maybe some other time an space;) but there is hopefully much to digest in the above:P
So we have now established that an atom (not hydrogen, bacause it only consists of one proton and electron) is build from neutrons that have no charge, protons that have a positive charge and the infamous negatively charged electrons. These are the basic building blocks of atoms, however, protons and neutrons made of still smaller parts called quarks, protons and neutrons are made of three quarks... every quark has its own "direction" or "frequency" that makes it what it is. Now we truly are in the quantum world, so lets stop here.
What's weird, is that atoms are, well damn, EMPTY! The volume of an atom (roughly 1 angstrom, or 10^-10 m in diameter) is about 15 orders of magnitude larger than the volume of a nucleon (roughly 1 fm, or 10^-15 m in diameter). It seems rather silly to express that ratio in percentage, but it would be 99.9999999999999% (13 nines after the decimal point). Of course, the radius of a nucleon is not an absolute figure, since there really is no concept of "radius" in quantum mechanics. So, 1 femtometer is a reasonable value. If you're wondering whether anyone has gone out and made a more precise measurement of the size of a nucleon, the answer is no: there's really no such thing as a precise measurement of the size of a nucleon. It is too uncertain ;)
Why is it, that we don't just collapse and fall through the ground, what holds us together. Love, could one say... and actually that's not so far from the truth, now I am not talking about the love between two persons, I am talking about the "love" between the atoms and the nucleus of the atom. Like two characters in love, they want to be near each other, want to share their space with each other, despite the friction that sometimes occur the attraction is still very strong. Atoms are the same, they are "forced" together by two forces, one is what binds atoms together and one keeps the nucleus together. What keeps the atoms together is the Pauli exclusion principle, it explains why electrons have the "orbits" they do, why there are can only be 2 electrons in the first orbit and what is the reason for that (I will post some more detailed stuff about the Pauli exclusion principle some other time), but the short story is, because of the "frequencies" or the "propability wave" and likes... so the fact that we don't fall apart is because the fundamental laws in physics, no one thing can occupy the same space and time, and what's more important to know, is that the "precise" seem to be equal to the impossible in the quantum theory, in our reality as well, it seems. If we would just fall through the ground because of the empty space in atoms, then it would mean that we would know the precise place, speed and energy of the given atoms, too precisely. This is then direct violation of quantum machanics and the uncertainty principle AND it would negate the pauli exclusion principle.
There would have been so much more that I would have loved to tell about... maybe some other time an space;) but there is hopefully much to digest in the above:P
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