4 ms·

The thing that really freaks me out is when you start thinking too much about what the heck is between all the parts of an atom. The answer of course is "nothi

by ck2 3y ago

The thing that really freaks me out is when you start thinking too much about what the heck is between all the parts of an atom. The answer of course is "nothing". Technically there is more of nothing in the universe even around thing that seem like a great deal of something. So not just the universe but everything, is mostly nothing with just very small bits of something. Don't think about it too much, lol

LocalH 3y ago
I mean, it may in some way be "empty space", but there's a hell of a lot of gravitational force in there too, relative to the size of the particles. If you were small enough to "be in there", you probably wouldn't want to be.
hydrogen7800 3y ago
And isn't most of "matter" not even "stuff", but forces?
- edgyquant 3y ago
  All things are just energy. But at the end of the day, all of this stuff is just abstractions humans use to make predictions. There’s no way to know for sure what things are “objectively.”
edgyquant 3y ago
This isn’t a fact though, it’s just as likely (if not more) that “nothing” doesn’t exist and all there truly is is matter and its interactions with one another. That’s why space is infinite, it isn’t actually a thing.
simiones 3y ago
Even worse, each "part" of the atom is itself infinitely small/point-like (electrons), or made up of infinitely small things (protons and neutrons, made up of infinitely small quarks).
jerf 3y ago
No, think about it a lot. The problem isn't the "nothing". The problem is your preconceived notions were wrong. They were always wrong. They didn't become wrong when this was discovered. The risk of you falling through the floor because you're supported by so much "nothing" does not change one tiny little bit when you learn how the world really works. Your worth as a human being, or an object, or whatever, was never rooted in you being a solid object in accordance with your preconceived notions. The anchor of value is that whatever you really are, you are valuable. When you find out that you weren't what you thought you were, your value does not change. You change the value you place on the new things you discovered, rather than the other way around. I read news articles about the origin of consciousness or how empty atoms are or whether the universe is a simulation with peace, because whatever I am, I am. My understanding of what I am is not who or what I am. It has been wrong many times before and the only sensible extrapolation of the world around me is that I am wrong in many more ways. My understanding can change, but I am what I am. That is not to say there is nothing that would ever shake me, but this does push the frontier much farther out, certainly well beyond merely discovering that atoms are "mostly empty space". (Which in its own way turns out to be wrong itself, or at the very least debatable. The idea that it's "mostly empty space" in my opinion quite nontrivially derives its cultural staying power precisely from the shock value you're experiencing, but not the actual truth of the situation. There's another perfectly sensible point of view that says the electrons are effectively solid in all the ways you care about, and pictures like [1] are really quite accurate and atoms really are fairly large. The "empty space" model comes from the idea that the electron is a point particle localized in one location, but that's a pre-quantum mechanics view of the world. From this perspective, yes, the floor beneath you is quite solid and not really "empty space".) (Then you dig further, into field theory, and it turns out that even "empty space" is itself quite busy... in a weird sort of way if I'm "freaked out" it's almost about the exact opposite of "the universe is so big and empty"; the universe of the Standard Model is absolute utter chaos and we're sitting up here at a level where in roughly the time of the smallest perceivable interval (call it 50ms for convenience), the universe has gone through 10^42 "ticks", that's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 "ticks". It staggers the mind how much the universe is doing all the dang time and how it all averages out and cancels into the visible universe as we experience it. Everyone knows that when you look "up", out into the stars and galaxies and clusters and superclusters and filaments that the universe is really big, but it is quite big "down" too!) [1]: https://www.monospektra.com/wp-content/uploads/pi1125_Bild1-1100x500.jpg https://www.monospektra.com/wp-content/uploads/pi1125_Bild1-...

by ck2 3y ago

LocalH 3y ago

I mean, it may in some way be "empty space", but there's a hell of a lot of gravitational force in there too, relative to the size of the particles. If you were small enough to "be in there", you probably wouldn't want to be.

hydrogen7800 3y ago

And isn't most of "matter" not even "stuff", but forces?

edgyquant 3y ago
All things are just energy. But at the end of the day, all of this stuff is just abstractions humans use to make predictions. There’s no way to know for sure what things are “objectively.”

edgyquant 3y ago

This isn’t a fact though, it’s just as likely (if not more) that “nothing” doesn’t exist and all there truly is is matter and its interactions with one another. That’s why space is infinite, it isn’t actually a thing.

simiones 3y ago

Even worse, each "part" of the atom is itself infinitely small/point-like (electrons), or made up of infinitely small things (protons and neutrons, made up of infinitely small quarks).

jerf 3y ago

No, think about it a lot. The problem isn't the "nothing". The problem is your preconceived notions were wrong. They were always wrong. They didn't become wrong when this was discovered. The risk of you falling through the floor because you're supported by so much "nothing" does not change one tiny little bit when you learn how the world really works. Your worth as a human being, or an object, or whatever, was never rooted in you being a solid object in accordance with your preconceived notions. The anchor of value is that whatever you really are, you are valuable. When you find out that you weren't what you thought you were, your value does not change. You change the value you place on the new things you discovered, rather than the other way around. I read news articles about the origin of consciousness or how empty atoms are or whether the universe is a simulation with peace, because whatever I am, I am. My understanding of what I am is not who or what I am. It has been wrong many times before and the only sensible extrapolation of the world around me is that I am wrong in many more ways. My understanding can change, but I am what I am. That is not to say there is nothing that would ever shake me, but this does push the frontier much farther out, certainly well beyond merely discovering that atoms are "mostly empty space". (Which in its own way turns out to be wrong itself, or at the very least debatable. The idea that it's "mostly empty space" in my opinion quite nontrivially derives its cultural staying power precisely from the shock value you're experiencing, but not the actual truth of the situation. There's another perfectly sensible point of view that says the electrons are effectively solid in all the ways you care about, and pictures like [1] are really quite accurate and atoms really are fairly large. The "empty space" model comes from the idea that the electron is a point particle localized in one location, but that's a pre-quantum mechanics view of the world. From this perspective, yes, the floor beneath you is quite solid and not really "empty space".) (Then you dig further, into field theory, and it turns out that even "empty space" is itself quite busy... in a weird sort of way if I'm "freaked out" it's almost about the exact opposite of "the universe is so big and empty"; the universe of the Standard Model is absolute utter chaos and we're sitting up here at a level where in roughly the time of the smallest perceivable interval (call it 50ms for convenience), the universe has gone through 10^42 "ticks", that's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 "ticks". It staggers the mind how much the universe is doing all the dang time and how it all averages out and cancels into the visible universe as we experience it. Everyone knows that when you look "up", out into the stars and galaxies and clusters and superclusters and filaments that the universe is really big, but it is quite big "down" too!) [1]: https://www.monospektra.com/wp-content/uploads/pi1125_Bild1-1100x500.jpg https://www.monospektra.com/wp-content/uploads/pi1125_Bild1-...