We're Made Up of A Lot of Empty Space

[exfileme]

Try to find the electron.

We're Made Up of A Lot of Empty Space : Read more

 

[blasterth]

I find more practical the analogy:
Utah = atom
Car = proton
lentil = electron

 

[Marco925]

Yet when i hit another car, i don't go through it....

 

[Gin Fushicho]

I'm not touching my screen resolution.

 

[kyosho]

"Matter is almost completely insubstantial. Atoms are more like a thought, or a concentrated bit of information".

 

[chickenhoagie]

there is no way its as big as space..that can't even be possible...?

 

[tpi2007]

Kevin, you should correct this phrase:

"At scale, the web page actually stretches out, and separates the proton from the electronic by 11 miles."

It's "electron" and not "electronic", of course.

 

[Ghaz]

Ah, the strange world of physics. Things like this remind me why I study it ~

Electrons can also tell whether you are observing them as a particle or wave, and switch how they behave as a result. But that is another story

 

[sstym]

Also, this is a picture of the planet Neptune, taken by Voyager 2 in 1989.
Though it is true that matter is essentially made of empty space, the analogy between electron orbits and planetary orbits is barely fit for 6th graders.

 

[JonathanDeane]

If we are 99.9999% empty space one might argue that we hardly exist at all.... and yet a few hundred milligrams of matter converted into energy destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima. A teaspoon of neutron star material weighs about a billion tons and so the amount of empty space would be far less.

 

[idisarmu]

They didn't actually get a picture of a proton though.... impossible!

 

[shan2752]

It only seems like a lot of empty space because of the frame of reference to the proton and electron. You could do the same thing with the Sun and the Earth when viewing the Milky Way Galaxy. It's actually not that awe inspiring really. What's awe inspiring is how it all came to be.

 

[brendano257]

Ummmm this is not new at all? I remember this theory except it was one pee (the vegetable) in a football stadium. Freshman year of highschool, I don't understand why it's particularly news worthy, but not the less food for thought.

 

[expertester]

WOW. This is intriguing. As an average person, I know there is some space between proton and electron but never ever imagine it would be this wide.

And we are created using this? And still we feel 50 liters of water is pretty heavy? LOL..we are so weak actually. 50 liters of these empty space LMAO.

1 question...if electron keep orbiting proton at constant pace, infinitely, where did it get its energy to do so?

Have been wondering this one since school

 

[jose3189]

expertester: I'm no expert at this (see what i did there?) but I would assume it is because of the positive/negative charge of the proton/electron that the elctron orbits the protron

 

[methal]

[citation][nom]expertester[/nom]WOW. This is intriguing. As an average person, I know there is some space between proton and electron but never ever imagine it would be this wide. And we are created using this? And still we feel 50 liters of water is pretty heavy? LOL..we are so weak actually. 50 liters of these empty space LMAO. 1 question...if electron keep orbiting proton at constant pace, infinitely, where did it get its energy to do so? Have been wondering this one since school[/citation]

Same place the earth gets its energy to orbit the sun.

 

[ceejer]

"Orbit" is really the not the correct word to use when describing an electron and proton interacting. After all, accelerating charges radiate, and for the electron to stay in an orbit it would have to be continually accelerating (think centripetal acceleration). If an electron were to orbit in the classical physics sense, it would rapidly radiate away sufficient energy that it would crash into the proton, which of course isn't what happens. Instead, quantum mechanics is necessary to describe the system. In the parlance of quantum, supposing the electron has a definite energy it's said to be in a stationary state, or energy eigenstate (for the mathematically inclined, its wavefunction is an eigenfunction of the Hamiltonian operator). When the electron is in such an energy eigenstate it will not have a clearly defined position. In this sense it's misleading to say the electron is at any particular distance; in fact upon measurement the electron could be found at *any* distance if it's in the ground state. This indeterminate position is what gives rise to the 'electron cloud,' as it's presented in high school chemistry. What's represented here is ostensibly the average distance found when measuring an ensemble of atoms in identically prepared states (i.e. the expectation value of the position operator), and presumably only for the ground state of the hydrogen atom. By exciting the electron to a higher energy state, the expectation value of its distance from the proton increases. In the case of very high energy states (close to the ionization energy) atoms can become extremely large, even on the order of microns, or thousandths of a millimeter (these are called Rydberg atoms). In that case, the electron would be a whole lot farther away... In fact, if the above scale is correct the electron would be about 1/3 the way to the moon. So what is it that makes matter feel so solid? As it turns out, it's the electromagnetic force. This force is unfathomably large in comparison with gravity... Consider that the magnetic interaction (which is already of relativistic origin, and generally small next to Coulomb interaction) from a tiny fridge magnet can overcome the gravitational interaction with the entire earth when lifting a paperclip. Gravity only seems to dominate because there is no negative mass particle like there are negatively charged particles to cancel out positive charges, so there are long-range gravitational forces in everyday life. Isn't science great?

 

[methal]

^ what he said, except i can sum it all up with

God made it that way.

 

[Zingam]

[citation][nom]methal[/nom]^ what he said, except i can sum it all up with God made it that way.[/citation]

...and Man made god... so what?

 

[delazaren]

G.O.D. made it (Giver Of Data)