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Rated: E · Other · Scientific · #1819766
How gaps are as, if not more, important than the stuff that they surround.
Did you know that there’s so much empty space (emptiness) inside matter (atoms, molecules) that the entire human race could be squeezed into the volume of a sugar cube?
Amazing! If any of you have ever had any experience of life drawing, you will know that is as equally important to notice the ‘space’ as well as the ‘matter’ itself. But in all my time observing the bits in-between I had no idea that the space really does out-way the stuff.
So all the solid things that we use and rely on including us, is mainly nothing at all. OK so the sugar cube of people would be very very heavy – I am assuming it is just all the nucleus’s bundled together without any of the other bits flying around, darting about.
Am I right in thinking it is the electrons that fluctuate all over the place that cause a magnetism which thereby create a solid structure (to include the other bits of particles and stuff)? But the exact whereabouts of electrons are so difficult to ascertain we can only predict the probability of where they may be.
Can an electron be in two places at the same time?
I think this may be the route to the problem of making oxygen (photosynthesis- older post). Many scientists have worked hard to explain this tiny fascinating world, and we have a good understanding thanks to many theories and experiments. In quantum mechanics, the behaviour of an electron in an atom is described by an orbital, which is a probability distribution rather than an orbit.
But to understand as I can see it, as to why they appear to be in two places at the same time comes down to a relatively simple explanation. I am only relaying what I have read and understand, obviously accepting certain things that I am not clever enough to dispute.
It is accepted that nature is dual. None of its components can only be considered as a particle or as a wave. To understand this, Niels Bohr introduced the Complementarity Principle in 1923: put simply, every component in nature has a particle, as well as a wavelike character, and it depends only on the observer which character he sees at any given time.
Einsteins theory that natural characteristics actually depend on the observer, that there must be a reality independent of the observer is now better understood. Quantum physics now accepts that there does not seem to be an independent reality, as continuous experiments confirm this with increasing conviction.
Thomas Youngs double-slit experiment demonstrates the inseparability of the wave and particle natures of light and other quantum particles. This goes some way to measuring where an electron has been, whether a particle or wave. As I understand it, it can be either one or the other but not both at the same time. The experiment demonstrates that electrons show particle-wave duality.
It gets quite complicated trying to understand all this here or not here stuff. But if all we can do is ascertain what exactly we are looking at from one observing view, how do we tell where it really is? If electrons for example appear to be one thing from one perspective, then another from another perspective then the possibilities of where the space and therefore electrons are, is is purely dependant on which way you look at it.
So until I can fully understand why electrons can be in two different places at the same time, I don’t think I have much chance of understanding how to catch them, pull them away from the nucleus and pile all the nucleus’s into one sugar cube sized box, then reality of us, to me, fitting into a sugar cube is practically impossible!
So hypothetically possible – practically impossible, and now the thought of separating nucleus’s from electrons seems more far fetched than getting us all to fit into a sugar cube.
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