4 ms·
Call me old fashion but I don't consider anything inside the perimeter of an atom as empty space.
by mrits 6y ago
Call 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?