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> Inside your body, you aren’t mostly empty space. You’re mostly a series of electron clouds, all bound together by the quantum rules that govern the entire Uni
by sporkologist 6y ago
> Inside your body, you aren’t mostly empty space. You’re mostly a series of electron clouds, all bound together by the quantum rules that govern the entire Universe.
So we are mostly electron clouds... and clouds by definition are mostly empty space.
- JacksonGariety 6y agoRather anti-climactic > look, you're not just empty space > just kidding! yeah you are
- mrits 6y agoCall me old fashion but I don't consider anything inside the perimeter of an atom as empty space.
- garmaine 6y agoAtoms don’t have a “perimeter”. That’s the point. Atoms are mostly "empty space" in the same way that the gap between a maglev train and its track is empty space (ignoring the air).
- garmaine 6y agoWhy the downvotes? That reply might have been ELI5-level, but I am a physicist. Atoms are fuzzy things without a hard interface boundary. At that scale it doesn't really make sense to say they have a "perimeter" at all. The distance at which they repel each other is different from the distance at which they cling together in a hydrogen bond, which is different from the distance between covalently bonded atoms, etc. The electrons themselves roam all over the place, including far outside whatever bond distance you might choose as the size of an atom. In short, there isn't a perimeter which defines "inside" and "outside" of the atom. The "empty space" thing is a bit of a poor analogy anyway. It comes from chemical experiments which showed that the repulsive cross section of an atom when pummeled with zero-charge particles is orders of magnitude smaller than the electric cross section. These are different forces though (strong vs electromagnetic), so it's a bit apples-to-oranges to begin with.
- mrits 6y agoIf atoms don't have perimeters then no objects made of atoms have perimeter.
- pixl97 6y agoThen how do black holes and neutron stars work?
- taneq 6y agoThe fields that fill the space are squished?
- tristanstcyr 6y agoFrom what I understand, the idea of "empty" no longer makes sense at that level. All you have are fields. There, everything is made out of fields and fields are everywhere. There is therefore no "empty" really anywhere, including inside yourself.
- aeturnum 6y agoI think you put it well. At the scales our brains are familiar with we experience "emptiness" as a kind of space which can have things placed in it. A chair is empty if you can sit on it, a box is empty if you can put something in it. The sub-atomic "empty" space is filled with fields of various kinds. You could not place something where those fields are. The spaces are not empty. When you fill a box with things, you are filling it with sub-atomic fields.
- Retric 6y agoPhysics is all based on predictions not arbitrary definitions. To suggest something is filling space you must be able to hit it with something else. This talk of empty space, comes from actual experiments. Shoot a neutral particle through that cloud and you generally find it really was empty. Wave particle duality doesn’t mean a particle is in every location, just that it could be in every location. After detection you generally find all the places it was not.
- goatlover 6y agoPhysics does say fields like gravity and EM fill all of space. That's not arbitrary, it's part of QM and Relativity. And wave particle duality could mean that a particle is a wave when it's not being detected.
- mcnamaratw 6y agoRight ... except that if I want to put more electrons in the same space I'm going to have to confine them more tightly. That prediction works.
- Retric 6y ago
- filterfish 6y agoI suggest you revise your definition of cloud.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Stierlitz 6y ago@sporkologist > Inside your body, you aren’t mostly empty space. You’re mostly a series of electron clouds, all bound together by the quantum rules that govern the entire Universe. > So we are mostly electron clouds... and clouds by definition are mostly empty space. But empty space isn't .. er .. empty ...
- Koshkin 6y agoNor is it always a space (could be a tab).
- mannykannot 6y agoBut if this article is correct, then clouds are not, by definition, mostly empty space! My point is that one cannot settle this sort of issue by invoking the definition of words. I am not sure what sort of fallacy the 'argument by dictionary definition' is, but it is definitely a fallacy (except possibly in lexicography.)