First Measurement of Distribution of Pressure Inside a Proton (phys.org) 174
Okian Warrior shares a report from Phys.Org: Inside every proton in every atom in the universe is a pressure cooker environment that surpasses the atom-crushing heart of a neutron star. That's according to the first measurement of a mechanical property of subatomic particles, the pressure distribution inside the proton, which was carried out by scientists at the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The nuclear physicists found that the proton's building blocks, the quarks, are subjected to a pressure of 100 decillion Pascal (1035) near the center of a proton, which is about 10 times greater than the pressure in the heart of a neutron star. The result was recently published in the journal Nature.
Is there energy to be had here? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is Subnuclear fission a possibility?
Re:Is there energy to be had here? (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm not a physicist but theoretically it should be possible. Quarks make up only 1% of the mass of a proton [1], the remaining 99% is the binding energy. If we could harvest that, we could get even more energy per kg of fuel than from nuclear fission.
[1] https://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=30159
Re: Is there energy to be had here? (Score:1)
Except quarks cannot exist by themselves.
So at best you can temporarily MAYBE coax them into quark-antiquark pairs.
But if you got antiquarks ⦠there is a vastly more energetic process ...
Maybe if you want to recycle the antiquarks. ...
But I don't know if turning 2 trios into 3 pairs would even release any energy
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my understanding is that a single quark "cannot exist" mostly because if there was ever a single quark, there's enough energy in the system to make more quarks just pop into existence to keep it company. If they pop into existence, then they can just as easily pop out of existence. So perhaps a process where a proton is split (releasing energy) and the quarks fly off (and almost immediately pair up to their partners out of nothing), or disappear into nothing (perhaps releasing even more energy).
Re:Is there energy to be had here? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nuclear fission is possible because there can exist free residual nuclei which in sum hold less energy than starting large fissile nucleus. It is a sort of balanced equation of materials and energy, where on both sides of equation you have all materials accounted for, but in terms of energy, you get surplus free energy on resulting side.
In case of nucleons however, we don't have such equation, because as far as we know, in nature's supply, we only have protons and neutrons, and they are approximately same size. If quarks could exist in free form, or build some stable particles smaller than protons and neutrons, we'd could have a theoretical chance to rob protons or neutrons of a part of their energy.
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If quarks could exist in free form, or build some stable particles smaller than protons and neutrons, we'd could have a theoretical chance to rob protons or neutrons of a part of their energy.
Minor pedantry: mesons are made up of only two quarks (technically, a quark and an antiquark), and the lightest mesons, the pions, are lighter than protons and neutrons.
Pions are only about 15% of the mass of protons, so based on mass, you could get quite a bit of energy out of the conversion of protons and neutrons. The problem is that you would need to convert a quark to an antiquark, which is a bit tricky.
Re:Is there energy to be had here? (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that you would need to convert a quark to an antiquark, which is a bit tricky.
You can't turn quarks into anti-quarks, and this is directly related to the conservation of baryon number [wikipedia.org]. Protons and neutrons have baryon number 1 each, while mesons have baryon number 0, and as far as we can tell, baryon number is a strictly conserved quantity. Since protons and neutrons are the lightest baryons, the "sub-nuclear" fission described is, as far as we know, not possible under the laws of physics as we understand them.
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I guess you could convert a proton (uud) and an antineutron (u'd'd') to three pions, and that would conserve baryon number. Two of those pions might annihilate and give you even more energy. Of course, at that point, you might as well just get your energy from neutron/antineutron or proton/antiproton annihilation and skip the extra steps.
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The issue is the power that we use is mostly mechanical energy, which then gets converted to electromagnetic.
There is significant power loss when ever we change energy (well it isn't lost, it is converted into an unusable form, such as sound, or heat dissipation).
Even with protonic fission we are still heating up water to create pressure difference to move a turbine that spins magnets which pushes and yanks electrons around.
We also have chemical energy from batteries and solar cells which more directly crea
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"radioactive waste of nuclear energy,"
I think you mean "more free energy from nuclear energy".
All the nasty types of waste are really just great sources of fuel that nobody can tap into because politics won't let them build a reactor design from this century.
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Basically. Most "nuclear waste" is the equivalent of someone throwing away a ketchup bottle that's half full because mom said not to shake, tap, or invert the bottle to get the rest out.
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It's worse. The "bottle" is typically 95% full when we throw it away.
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And then we can create our zombie army! [wikipedia.org]
Well.. close enough I guess.
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In the name of humanity?
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It sure what this boilerplate post is about, but cheaper, massive amounts of energy, especially non-polluting, is a valuable goal.
With cheap enough energy, you can cheaply boil ocean water to distill fresh for people around the world.
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The problem there is that in order to take a nibble of that binding energy you have to find a lower energy state for everything to drop into, and there doesn't seem to be one available.
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Re:Is there energy to be had here? (Score:5, Interesting)
What is possible is matter-antimatter annihilation. So if we found a cheap source of antiprotons
Re:Is there energy to be had here? (Score:5, Funny)
So if we found a cheap source of antiprotons ...
Start an Internet campaign that protons are racists. You'll have more antiprotons than you know what to do with.
Re:Is there energy to be had here? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is there energy to be had here? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is Subnuclear fission a possibility?
Well, the proton is already the lowest energy level. The binding energy for hadrons works a bit differently than for atoms - pulling a quark out of a photon requires so much energy that new quarks are created and the quarks remain bound in particles. Free neutrons, OTOH, decay with a half life of ~14 minutes IIRC, when they aren't packed in tightly with other protons and neutrons.
TFS is a bit odd too. Of course the pressure in a proton is greater than in a neutron star - when the internal pressure in a start exceeds the pressure inside a neutron, the neutrons collapse and you get a black hole. And protons and neutrons are reasonably similar.
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I thought that the reasoning should be ''when the internal pressure in a star exceeds the pressure inside a neutron then another interesting object will be created which may look like a single superneutron, but before that happens the star will turn into a black hole for different reasons.
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You may well be right. [wikipedia.org] However, I suspect a quark star only exists inside a black hole, which would make it hard to verify. (Much like the theory that F6 tornadoes exist, but only inside an F5, so how can you ever prove it?)
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I regularly notice that black holes are used as some kind of 'structural' mechanism in stars while it's in principle independent of strong forces or the life cycle of a star. Maybe there is a theoretical solution where a huge star becomes a black hole at the start of the lifecycle. From an elementary reasoning the Schwarzschild radius is proportional to mass so a low density cloud which is large enough can already be a black hole.
In a way the idea of a quark star in a black hole only comes up because we're
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Is Subnuclear fission a possibility?
You would have to identify a usable lower energy state that you could 'fission down' to.
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No and yes.
Yes, it's possible and indeed 'subnuclear fission' is already done in particle accelerators, you can smash a proton into a quark plasma -- although at those energies you are spontaneously generating new particle/anti-particle pairs so the idea of discrete particle identities makes a bit less sense.
No, there's no energy to be had there. The proton is stable for at least 10**34 years (age of the universe is 10**10 year) and so any such fission will necessarily require you put in more energy than yo
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Absolutely. Neutrons can decay to a Proton and Electron and extra energy. This is fission of a nuclear particle which I think is what you mean by Subnuclear fission.
Not really. Fission implies splitting of parts that are already there. Neutrons aren't made of protons and electrons; that was the hypothesis at one point, but observations of particle spin didn't match the predictions you would get with a neutron that contains a proton and an electron. Neutrons become protons and electrons (and antineutrinos) by converting a down quark to an up quark.
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By definition - Fission: the action of dividing or splitting something into two or more parts. By saying "Fission implies splitting of parts that are already there." you are making an arbitrary decision on the meaning of fission. At best this is semantics and splitting hairs. Please provide a generally accepted reference that shows proof that fission only involves the
Re:Is there energy to be had here? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm assuming by this term you mean a fission process which occurs within protons or neutrons, rather than within atomic nuclei. The answer to that is no, no matter how you slice it.
A short explanation for this is simply that quarks are stable particles, like electrons. It's not possible for there to be lower-mass versions of the up/down quarks which we haven't yet observed. There are certainly higher-energy versions of these same particles, but quarks themselves cannot exist except when bound to one another, either in mesons (two quarks) or baryons (three quarks, like protons and neutrons).
The reason why quarks can't exist alone is that if you take a meson and try to pull apart the two quarks that make it up, it takes so much energy that a quark/anti-quark pair is created, so instead of pulling a meson apart to get two quarks, you end up with two mesons. Similar things happen if you try to pull a quark out of a baryon (like a proton): you end up with a baryon and a meson instead of a meson and a free quark.
In the end, the proton is the lowest-energy stable state that a collection of three quarks can wind up in (mesons are all unstable, and rapidly decay into either electrons/positrons and neutrinos if they have charge, photons if they do not). But higher-mass baryons, of which there are a great many, will decay into other baryons and collections of particles. This process of more massive baryons decaying into protons/neutrons is probably the closest thing to "subnuclear fission" that exists.
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So after realizing E = mc it's just converting all of it back to energy, yes? It's that simple, right? Fine. But how do you actually do it?
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So after realizing E = mc it's just converting all of it back to energy, yes? It's that simple, right? Fine. But how do you actually do it?
It is simple, you just add antimatter and use the photons produced by the annihilation.
Getting the antimatter might be difficult, but the process is simple.
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How much teen angst is that? (Score:1)
And where is there a safe space for those poor quarks?
(Also, BeauHD, you shmuck: It's 10^35, or write 10e35, not 1035).
Re:How much teen angst is that? (Score:4, Funny)
And where is there a safe space for those poor quarks?
(Also, BeauHD, you shmuck: It's 10^35, or write 10e35, not 1035).
I'm sure Quarks will be safe on DS9
Re: How much teen angst is that? (Score:2)
Rule of aquisition 286:
Safe spaces are not good for business!
Strong force? (Score:1)
In thought strong force refers to the force that binds the protons inside the necleus.... Do quarks even need a force holding them together? Like does opposite spin quarks repel each other?
Color force (Score:5, Informative)
In thought strong force refers to the force that binds the protons inside the necleus.... Do quarks even need a force holding them together? Like does opposite spin quarks repel each other?
The color force holds three quarks together in a proton or neutron. Protons have charge, so there's significant repulsive force among them inside the nucleus.
A quark inside a proton can be bound (by color) to the two other quarks in that proton, but it's also physically near the quarks of a neighboring proton. It can "look outside" it's own particle and see other nearby quarks, and feel the color force from those as well. That's what we call the strong force, and it keeps the nucleus together.
If heavy nucleii were composed completely of protons, the aggregate electromagnetic repulsion would overwhelm the strong force and the nucleus would fly apart. Adding a few neutrons to the mix allows the same sort of neighboring-color-attraction without the EM repulsion, and makes the nucleus stable.
to quote marty (Score:4, Insightful)
heavy
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1035? (Score:5, Informative)
1035 doesn't sound so bad. 10^35 on the other hand...
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It’s only missing some zeros....
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1035 doesn't sound so bad. 10^35 on the other hand...
For years now, the editors have not understood science. Now, they don't even understand scientific notation.
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Exactly. cut and paste didn't respect the font size change. It takes brains to memorize scientific facts (intelligence) and it takes intuition to make use of the information (wisdom).
We have a lot of intelligent people on the planet, not so many are wise anymore. They are all wise-arses though :)
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A rather short perl script could replace brains in situations like this.
Jefferson Lab Open Day May 19th (Score:5, Informative)
If you are in the Newport News, VA area on Saturday, the Jefferson Lab is having an open day from 9AM to 3PM. https://www.jlab.org/ [jlab.org]
Also the press release from the lab itself about the Proton pressure QUARKS FEEL THE PRESSURE IN THE PROTON [jlab.org]
Great to see JLab in the news. (Score:2)
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As a tidewater native, I'm really exited to see this quality of research coming out of Jefferson Lab. It's a great asset to the area.
If only they could turn their expertise to solving pressure waves on I-64
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"Pressure wave" traffic jams I assume? That's a solved problem - all that remains is to convince drivers to implement the solution, one that every colony ant on the planet already uses: every driver must try to always remain roughly equidistant between the cars in front of and behind them, which causes the waveform to dissipate.
Ants don't have traffic jams. Humans on the other hand aren't smart enough to avoid them. Riding that guy's bumper isn't going to save you more than a few seconds, at most, but g
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Hmmm. Rather than having everyone switch over to self-driving cars, perhaps what would work here is to have all cars equipped with a collision avoidance/following distance maintenance system with haptic feedback. The technology for maintaining following distances exists, although it is not usually tied to the accelerator with haptic feedback.
The idea is that your car's accelerator would behave normally until your car got within a speed-determined distance from the vehicle in front of you. At that point
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An interesting idea, except you don't want to maintain a fixed following distance - that's what creates the conditions for pressure waves to exist. You want to dynamically adjust following distance based on how much space you have behind you as well. If there's a bunch of empty space behind you - slow down and spread out - then the person in front of you now has more space behind them, and should do the same thing, etc,etc,etc. Likewise, if there's a bunch of empty space in front of you, and traffic behi
Macroscopic concept? (Score:5, Interesting)
Could someone please explain this? I always thought pressure was a more macroscopic concept, related to the force exerted by (many) bouncing particles on a wall, or similar. What is the meaning of pressure within a proton? And what is its meaning? Like density or "edges", I would think macroscopic concepts are no longer valid in that realm.
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Size of an electron? (Score:2)
You are wrong about quarks being 3D objects
Every single existing bit (with mass) has 3 dimensions. Any other number of dimensions is only possible in our imagination, not in the physical world.
Apropos of nothing, what are the dimensions of an electron?
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Quantized universe (Score:2)
Or, by asking a question similar to yours, how do you calculate the pressure on an electron? Which dimensions would you choose to calculate the required area? Or do you consider that you cannot apply pressure on electrons? Or that electrons don't have area? Please, illustrate me.
If the universe is computable (a strong requirement, since being "uncomputable" puts it outside of normal mathematics), then position must be quantized in some way. If position were a (mathematical) real number, then each position would require an infinite amount of information, and any interaction would be uncomputable.
If position is quantized, then you can have a particle that occupies 1 quantum point and nothing else. It would be similar to having a computer game on a finite 3d grid of points - at the ma
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Oh, this is an interesting question.
If you by dimension mean size, there is a classical estimate of what radius an electron has. If one starts to put together a small sphere of "continuous" electric charge by moving infinitely small droplets of charge from infinity to the surface of the sphere, and continues to do so until the amount of energy consumed matches the relativistic energy of an electron, mc^2, one ends up with an charged sphere with radius 2.8E-15m.
However, in modern physics it is close to meani
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Or, in other words, a new geometry where massive non 3D objects can exist outside your imagination
We call this "quantum mechanics" where particles act like waves (and waves act like particles) and things can have momentum but no mass.
Quarks have mass but no volume. The very concept of "3D objects" vanishes in a puff of mathematics.
=Smidge=
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Your quantum mechanics
"My" quantum mechanics? As if I came up with it myself...
There is absolutely no doubt that quantum mechanics is as real and correct as any other aspect of science. It's perhaps one of the best fields there is in terms of predictive power, despite how intangible and counter-intuitive it is. The fact that we're even able to have this interaction is testament to that!
You seem to be the one trying to shoehorn decades of well established and applied quantum physics into a classical worldview. That's not going to
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Dimension means attribute. When we say "three dimensions in space" we are saying that we need three attributes to describe the concept of location.
For each attribute of a dimension, we can talk about points (single values) or sizes (ranges of values between points). Therefore point doesn't necessarily mean that the location is specific, only that we are talking about one numeric value for location instead of a range.
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You might be right if a proton was merely three quarks. But it turns out that this is not the case: protons are sort of a cloud of quarks, anti-quarks, and gluons. The "three quarks" are known as the valence quarks (they're the only ones that aren't paired with anti-quarks), but only make up a small fraction of the total mass (without looking it up, I think it's something like 5-10%). Nearly all of the rest of the energy is made up a dynamic swarm of particles. The sheer number of particles inside a pro
Re: Macroscopic concept? (Score:3)
Pressure is force per unit area (as so many have pointed out). In a static(ish) system a force in one direction must be balanced by one opposing it. If youâ(TM)ve got a jar of air, the walls of the jar feel pressure from the air molecules hitting them, and oppose that pressure with forces generated from the electromagnetic force holding the glass molecules together.
Protons must also experience balanced forces, or they would collapse or explode. The inward force is probably mostly the strong force. The
"the pressure distribution inside the proton" (Score:2)
Life of a proton (Score:1)
"Wow, another day stuck in this darned nucleus, wondering if today will be the day we fall apart, not knowing what element I'll be part of next. Always worrying about whether the electrons out there really care about me or not. And what am I going to do if something takes an electron away from me--I mean us. I'll feel so empty. Yet there's this continuous pressure to perform, to keep it together. Keep hanging on, keep hanging on..."
Damn (Score:2)
I always knew I was under constant pressure, but this is ridiculous.
Now he's 10^^12 times too weak (Score:2)
> which is about 10 times greater than the pressure in the heart of a neutron star
Superman should upgrade his Fortress of Solitude key to embarrass the Hulk even more.
Quark stars? (Score:2)
So, it's common for protons to resist pressure greatly higher than that found in a neutron star's core. Doesn't 10x greater than a neutron star's core - how big of a neutron star? - reach into the realm of gravity high enough to trap light? Doesn't this mean that some objects we perceive as black holes aren't singularities on the inside, but that the same force that keeps protons from collapsing into singularities will work for a star? Hence, they'd be quark stars *and* they'd appear like black holes fro
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The real question here is : Who gives a fuck?
That shit happened 17 years ago. Move on already.
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The real question here is : Who gives a fuck?
That shit happened 17 years ago. Move on already.
Ah, millennial gnat-hair attention spans. The FBI spent 45 years trying to track down D.B. Cooper [thevintagenews.com]. It took 18 years to find the Unibomber [time.com] and 37 years to track down the last of the Baptist Street Church bombers [fbi.gov].
Just think how much time and money they could have saved had you been there to explain to them nobody "gives a fuck" anymore (including, of course, the victims and their families), and so they just needed to "move on already."
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I'm 40.
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I'm 40.
So you were slightly ahead of your time. Congrats, I guess.
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*shrug*
Had all the fucks I could give about it drained from me by the 9/11 truthers constantly repeating the same tired "facts" without bringing anything fresh or evidence based to the table.
Even flat earthers annoy me less, at least they try!
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Even flat earthers annoy me less, at least they try!
That, they do! https://www.popularmechanics.c... [popularmechanics.com]
Re: Then why did WTC7 collapse? (Score:1)
Its was Trump's fault... duh!
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All these geniuses put together can't figure out why WTC7 collapsed.... hmmm....
AE911Truth org
Hey, look!
It's Rosie "Fire can't melt steel (I'm too dumb to know what a fucking blacksmith is)!" O'Donnell.
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All these truther geniuses that figured out why WTC7 collapsed couldn't figure out the pressure inside a proton... hmmm....
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Neutrons stars are a form of degenerate matter [wikipedia.org] resulting from quantum effects (and gravity), it's a perfectly cromulent comparison.
As others have pointed out, pressure is F/A. If you have a spherical cow in a vacuum at absolute zero standing on top of a pencil balanced on its point, the pencil point is still exerting pressure on the surface underneath.
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As expected, most of the replies are by people who don't know the subject matter, but want to pretend they are smart so they dismiss your question.
It might be the strong and weak nuclear forces, or it might be the fundemental balancing of quark properties. It's also possible that the nuclear forces are side-effects of the fundamental quark balancing, or even the reverse.
"Pressure" may not be a good term for it, but "required compressive energy per unit of predicted surface area of the current model for a s
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I am indeed not a physicist, my point was simply that the OP's assertion that pressure is a bogus description is wrong. Pressure is not dependent on bouncing particles (cf. the cold bovine standing in for the typical elephant), and indeed is traditionally discussed in similar realms i.e; neutron stars.
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Any force you like.
Pressure has nothing to do with atoms bouncing, per se. In fact, at high pressure, in solids, etc. they can't do that at all. They exert a force against other atoms.
In a gas, sure, the "atmospheric pressure" is the result of atoms moving around each other, but even there - gravity makes the pressure on the bottom of the container greater than the lid. You might not care, it might only be a small difference, but it's still contributing to the pressure on the floor.
If you have a force ex