Atoms Aren't Empty (aeon.co) 187
Kitty Oppenheimer: Can you explain quantum mechanics to me?
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Well, this glass, this drink, this counter top, uhh.. our bodies, all of it. It's mostly empty space. Groupings of tiny energy waves bound together.
Kitty Oppenheimer: By what?
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Forces of attraction strong enough to convince us [that] matter is solid, to stop my body passing through yours.
— IMDB quote from Oppenheimer
Flash forward to 2023, where Mario Barbatti is a theoretical chemist and physicist researching light and molecule interactions. He's also a professor of chemistry at Aix Marseille University in France. Writing this week for Aeon, Barbatti argues that "there are no empty spaces within the atom.
"The empty atom picture is likely the most repeated mistake in popular science." It is unclear who created this myth, but it is sure that Carl Sagan, in his classic TV series Cosmos (1980), was crucial in popularising it. After wondering how small the nuclei are compared with the atom, Sagan concluded that "[M]ost of the mass of an atom is in its nucleus; the electrons are by comparison just clouds of moving fluff. Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing." I still remember how deeply these words spoke to me when I heard them as a kid in the early 1980s. Today, as a professional theoretical chemist, I know that Sagan's statements failed to recognise some fundamental features of atoms and molecules...
Misconceptions feeding the idea of the empty atom can be dismantled by carefully interpreting quantum theory, which describes the physics of molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. According to quantum theory, the building blocks of matter — like electrons, nuclei and the molecules they form — can be portrayed either as waves or particles. Leave them to evolve by themselves without human interference, and they act like delocalised waves in the shape of continuous clouds. On the other hand, when we attempt to observe these systems, they appear to be localised particles, something like bullets in the classical realm. But accepting the quantum predictions that nuclei and electrons fill space as continuous clouds has a daring conceptual price: it implies that these particles do not vibrate, spin or orbit. They inhabit a motionless microcosmos where time only occasionally plays a role...
A molecule is a static object without any internal motion. The quantum clouds of all nuclei and electrons remain absolutely still for a molecule with a well-defined energy. Time is irrelevant... Time, however, comes into play when a molecule collides with another one, triggering a chemical reaction. Then, a storm strikes. The quantum steadiness bursts when the sections of the electronic cloud pour from one molecule upon another. The clouds mix, reshape, merge, and split. The nuclear clouds rearrange to accommodate themselves within the new electronic configuration, sometimes even migrating between molecules. For a fraction of a picosecond (10-12 seconds or a billionth of a millisecond), the tempest rages and reshapes the molecular landscape until stillness is restored in the newly formed compounds.
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Well, this glass, this drink, this counter top, uhh.. our bodies, all of it. It's mostly empty space. Groupings of tiny energy waves bound together.
Kitty Oppenheimer: By what?
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Forces of attraction strong enough to convince us [that] matter is solid, to stop my body passing through yours.
— IMDB quote from Oppenheimer
Flash forward to 2023, where Mario Barbatti is a theoretical chemist and physicist researching light and molecule interactions. He's also a professor of chemistry at Aix Marseille University in France. Writing this week for Aeon, Barbatti argues that "there are no empty spaces within the atom.
"The empty atom picture is likely the most repeated mistake in popular science." It is unclear who created this myth, but it is sure that Carl Sagan, in his classic TV series Cosmos (1980), was crucial in popularising it. After wondering how small the nuclei are compared with the atom, Sagan concluded that "[M]ost of the mass of an atom is in its nucleus; the electrons are by comparison just clouds of moving fluff. Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing." I still remember how deeply these words spoke to me when I heard them as a kid in the early 1980s. Today, as a professional theoretical chemist, I know that Sagan's statements failed to recognise some fundamental features of atoms and molecules...
Misconceptions feeding the idea of the empty atom can be dismantled by carefully interpreting quantum theory, which describes the physics of molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. According to quantum theory, the building blocks of matter — like electrons, nuclei and the molecules they form — can be portrayed either as waves or particles. Leave them to evolve by themselves without human interference, and they act like delocalised waves in the shape of continuous clouds. On the other hand, when we attempt to observe these systems, they appear to be localised particles, something like bullets in the classical realm. But accepting the quantum predictions that nuclei and electrons fill space as continuous clouds has a daring conceptual price: it implies that these particles do not vibrate, spin or orbit. They inhabit a motionless microcosmos where time only occasionally plays a role...
A molecule is a static object without any internal motion. The quantum clouds of all nuclei and electrons remain absolutely still for a molecule with a well-defined energy. Time is irrelevant... Time, however, comes into play when a molecule collides with another one, triggering a chemical reaction. Then, a storm strikes. The quantum steadiness bursts when the sections of the electronic cloud pour from one molecule upon another. The clouds mix, reshape, merge, and split. The nuclear clouds rearrange to accommodate themselves within the new electronic configuration, sometimes even migrating between molecules. For a fraction of a picosecond (10-12 seconds or a billionth of a millisecond), the tempest rages and reshapes the molecular landscape until stillness is restored in the newly formed compounds.
foiled again (Score:3)
Re:foiled again (Score:5, Insightful)
How is Rutherford's experiment explained then ?
Well, Rutherford's experiment had a person *looking* at the atoms. TFS says you're not allowed to look.
Quantum wave functions may have static solutions spread out in space. However, the essential property of these functions is that they merely describe the probability of locating a particle at any given location with an observation. IMO deciding whether saying the wave function is a physical thing that takes up space, verses saying that it is nothing more than a mathematical abstraction, is a matter for philosophers to ponder while gazing at their navels.
Re:foiled again (Score:5, Informative)
But quantum physics doesn't work, and we know it doesn't work. How on earth does a planck length work if space is continuous as in General Relativity. How does GR work if doesn't describe quantum mechanics?
The answer is clearly "we don't know" and it's ok to have that as answer. It's better than pretending we do know and that if others were just "smart enough" they'd understand how it's handwaved away by quoting someone else that doesn't know either.
Re:foiled again (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not that quantum physics does not work. The problem is that quantum physics works, and we are pretty sure it shouldn't.
Re: foiled again (Score:4, Insightful)
What was that about accuracy to fifteen decimal places, again?
Re: foiled again (Score:2)
Does quantum physics make a prediction that is observably off by 10^120?
Re: foiled again (Score:2)
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You are correct, but I had to read your post several times before I agreed.
It's a very meaningful statement that "While hypotheses can be found to be false, that doesn't affect other science."
Re: foiled again (Score:2)
Does the hypothesis that dark matter was caused by planck energy follow logically from the standard model, or is it just a hunch? Whereas, does the prediction of zero point energy follow strictly from the standard model?
In other words if an epicyclist hypothesized that Mercury moved faster when it was windier, and was disproved by observation, does it have the same effect on the theory as hypothesizing that there is no parallax motion of the stars and finding from observations that there actually is?
Re: foiled again (Score:5, Informative)
As regards the planck length, you're demonstrating a common fundamental error. The planck length is the smallest measurable length, not the smallest possible length. There is a difference between the two. If you look at how we make measurements at small scales, you'll see why. Use light for example, with visible light our measuring ability is limited by the wavelength of the light used. Want to measure to greater accuracy? Decrease the wavelength and hence increase the energy. So use ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma etc. To measure smaller and smaller distances, we need to focus more and more energy into smaller volumes. Given the equivalency between matter and energy, at the planck length, the amount of energy required (and hence mass) produces a black hole that immediately decays. Adding even more energy does not increase the resolution of the measurement, it merely creates a larger hole with more uncertainty. So remember, the planck length is not the smallest possible distance. It is the smallest measurable distance.
This is why I read /. (Score:2, Insightful)
If you don't teach, consider it. This is a well-written and fascinating explanation.
Re:foiled again (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems far more likely to me that it's GR that doesn't work.
Consider:
Standard model of QM: extensively tested in the lab, and *every* prediction thus far has turned out to be 100% accurate. There's constantly new papers published about "new forces may have been discovered", a.k.a. experiments don't seem to align with predictions... but to date EVERY one has eventually proven to be just an anomalous data spike.
GR - explained the anomalous precession of Mercury's and correctly predicted that gravity can bend the path of light, and the gravitational time dilation we measure around Earth... but EVERY prediction it has made at the galactic or larger scales has disagreed wildly with observations, to the point that it requires that over 90% of the mass in the universe must be things we've never seen any other evidence of.
Of the two, there's FAR more reason to expect that it's gravity we don't understand correctly.
Re:foiled again (Score:4, Informative)
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Of the two, there's FAR more reason to expect that it's gravity we don't understand correctly.
Yet.
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Why do you think the value of the cosmological constant predicted by quantum field theory is as much as 10^120 higher than the value actually observed by astronomers?
Re: foiled again (Score:3)
Do you think wikipedia agrees with you or with me?
Re:foiled again (Score:5, Informative)
To quote Monty Python: "It's only a model."
In the particle model, it is empty if you can fire a particle though without hitting anything, as Rutherford showed.
In QM, "empty" isn't really a meaningful concept.
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This story isn't even a model. It's an interpretation, and kind of a fringe one, of a model.
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However, the essential property of these functions is that they merely describe the probability of locating a particle at any given location with an observation.
Not so. Many experiments, starting with the two slit, but many far more ornate and definitive on the issue, show that the particle is only a particle when interacting in certain ways. So long as you're not measuring it in those ways, it *is* a wave, and can do many things that particles cannot. And as a wave it can meaningfully be said to simultaneously fill the entire volume occupied by its wavefunction. That's why experiments like the Elitzur-Vaidman bomb tester let you discover definite information a
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However, the essential property of these functions is that they merely describe the probability of locating a particle at any given location with an observation.
Not so. Many experiments, starting with the two slit, but many far more ornate and definitive on the issue, show that the particle is only a particle when interacting in certain ways. So long as you're not measuring it in those ways, it *is* a wave, and can do many things that particles cannot. And as a wave it can meaningfully be said to simultaneously fill the entire volume occupied by its wavefunction. .
There was a paper titled *Anti-Photon* published [Appl. Phys. B 60, 77-84 (1995), W. E. Lamb, Jr.] that argued that the idea the photons were particles at all was false and that only QM fields exist. According to this paper a "photon" is only a unit of energy measured when it is exchanged in some fashion. He does not address Compton scattering though, which seems to show that photons-as-particles definitely exist, so I am not convinced he has the subject nailed down. He may just be leaving out the stuff tha
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How is Rutherford's experiment explained then ?
Well, Rutherford's experiment had a person *looking* at the atoms. TFS says you're not allowed to look.
Yeah, and I'm an incredibly good looking person. A solid 10. Handsome face with beautiful, sensitive eyes and a solid square jaw, and a totally ripped body: Michelangelo could not have carved a more beautiful specimen. But only if you don't look.
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6'3, 215 lb?
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Within the realm of possibilities, but not within the range of probabilities.
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In quantum theory, the act of observation or measurement causes the wave function to collapse and forces a quantum system into a definite state. This interaction between quanta can occur independently of human observation.
Using "measuring" rather than "looking" detaches the concept from anthropocentric implications and emphasizes that quantum phenomena arise from quanta interacting at the quantum scale.
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That does apply in field theory, but the term "particle" only applies when a wave makes contact with a particle.
That's when the wave function collapses and becomes a particle.
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That said, a water cloud is essentially evenly distributed. Electron clouds do have voids, they h
Re: foiled again (Score:2)
What is an electron hole?
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What is an electron hole?
Something like this [explainxkcd.com].
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The post said: "The cloud is still there."
But what if the electron cloud has moved on, i.e., what if there is only an electron hole there?
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In the quantum sense, the electron is not in any one location within the cloud. Rather, the cloud represents the potential location of the ele
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When an electron is bumped out of position, that position screams for another electron. It's a positive charge called a "hole."
Holes flow. When an electron fills a hole, it leaves another hole somewhere. This goes on until an atom reaches equilibrium, as in powering off the electron/hole flow.
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Think of your cloud of m
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How is this different from Aether theory?
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Imagin
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There is no empty space anywhere in the universe. Look at the quantum foam. Also, it would violate Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
If a point was empty, all values would be evaluated to zero. ALL values. No can do.
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Human perception is defined by time. We observe everything in relation to time, because time is so critical to us.
This is not the same in context of quantum physics and this argument.
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Time is a standalone concept via entropy. Entropy establishes the arrow of time. The bodies of work and equations have no variable named, "human."
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While I'm asleep, I cease to exist
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While I'm asleep, I cease to exist
If you wish to cease to exist while you are sleeping... that can probably be arranged.
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lol
If I live alone, and I'm not conscious to observe myself do my particles delocalise annihilating me into a localized quantum cloud of electrons where time is irrelevant and when my soul observes my corporeal nonexistence it causes the localized quantum cloud to reconstitute my body whereupon I awake believing it was only a dream?
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That might be a stretch indeed if the universe slept when you did.
Re: foiled again (Score:2)
When you die, do you cease to exist?
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Neutrinos will pass through 35,000 light-years of lead. No submarine can use them as a communication device.
That explanation didn't convince me (Score:3)
Sure, they are not "empty". The other side is that they are "full"? The empty explanation is fine for general understanding. You can shoot particles through other particles with no interaction (sometimes) which means there is "empty" space in there.
If you have a degree in the relevant topics, saying they are "empty" is not something you would say. The statement is fine for general understanding and seems a little nitpicky.
How come x-rays go through this "not empty" space of some things, but not others? (Plus many other similar question)
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Re:That explanation didn't convince me (Score:4, Insightful)
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This is a common misconception. You are conflating observation with measurement and anthropomorphizing both. Observations are not restricted to, nor defined by human eyeballs. Quantum physics works for the blind and has done so way before humans became sentient. Like, say 13.5 billion years ago.
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What is the field associated with entanglement?
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According to a recent paper it's probably polarization. You don't want to call that a field? Oh well.
FWIW, I think the static picture of an isolated atom or particle is due to modeling the results of tests with an averaging filter. It *could* be static, but there's no reason to believe so. It just makes for a simpler model. (OTOH, I'm no expert in the field.)
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Macroscopic intuition is not your friend (Score:2)
Empty and full aren't really meaningful when the best you can do is talk about wavefunctions and mumble about collapses and renormalizations.
Re: Macroscopic intuition is not your friend (Score:2)
If spin was really spin, would electrons rotate faster than light?
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Yes. You have to define what you mean by the radius of an electron, but if you imagine them as a blob or shell of charge of a size that's reasonably compatible with experiment, their "surface" would have to spin at (IIRC) something like 100x the speed of light to account for their intrinsic angular momentum.
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Not so. Gravity worked far before Newton and Einstein weighed (a carefully crafted pun) in. Very few scientists felt the theories were mumbo humbo. Failure to fully comprehend by lay does not negate the body of work.
At very large and very small scales (Score:5, Insightful)
...our everyday life human notions of things are not very useful. Things like "empty", "solid", "cloud", "dark", "moving", etc. don't translate very well to these scales.
Arguing over such vocabulary is mostly pointless there. Even "time" has questionable usage there.
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Actually, both are parts of the same beast. Our failure, so far, to make the connection doesn't negate that.
10-12? (Score:3)
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or 10e-12 if you're not using those new-fangled programming languages.
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What is this devilry?
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Not so sure... (Score:2)
Quote from the article: "In atoms and molecules, electrons are everywhere! Look how the yellow cloud permeates the entire molecular volume in Figure 1. Thus, when we see that atoms and molecules are packed with electrons, the only reasonable conclusion is that they are filled with matter, not the opposite."
Just because in the snapshot you see is a "yellow cloud", it doesn't mean that "the only reasonable conclusion is that they are filled with matter, not the opposite".
I can show you snapshots of people whe
This make no sense (Score:2)
We don't have any clue whether atoms are "empty" or not. This is because our human-scale concepts do not adequately describe reality at the atomic and subatomic levels.
We can only describe experiments' results as probabilities. That is, whenever we look atoms are as Sagan described: made of small concentrations of matter like the electrons and the nucleus. When we don't look and let particles evolve, well... by definition, we don't know. But we do know how the probabilities of outcomes of experiments evolve
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FWIW, I think waves and particles are equally easy to explain, it's when what you see depends on how you look that things start getting difficult.
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You make a point.
what you see depends on how you look
is totally wrong. Examining the various verified equations, experiments, and theories, we don't find any variables regarding "see" or "look." Humans have nothing to do with it.
And yet... and yet... (Score:2)
Sure, electron orbitals are smeared across space in fanciful shapes like twisted balloon toys. No spinning, no vibration, no orbit. And yet these orbitals have angular momentum. How does that work? They may show relativistic effects from very high orbital velocities. What the heck is velocity for an orbital?
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Angular momentum is what happens when you rotate something that's not a scalar. Your experience of angular momentum is rotating lots of little vectors describing the spatial separation between some blobs of energy. The intrinsic angular momentum of a particle is the result of rotating the intrinsic vector (for bosons) or spinor (for fermions) of its field.
Spin and intrinsic angular momentum arise pretty inevitably from the geometry of quantum mechanics. It's our misunderstanding of macroscopic angular momen
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What seems weird to me is the idea that an electron shell could be rotating.
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They aren't. The orbital angular momentum is from the electrons that occupy those shells.
Does it seem strange that the solar system has angular momentum?
" human interference" has nothing to do with this (Score:2)
The wave *function* collapses whenever there is interaction/interference of any kind. The bigger myth is that this is in anyway dependent on some human wanting to conduct a measurement. Even if nobody looks, that radioactive decay either happens or does not happen and in turn can cause other things to happen or not happen. The cat is either dead or not, even if we do not know whether it is dead or not.
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Why do you think wikipedia says: "According to quantum theory, it is impossible to predict when a particular atom will decay, regardless of how long the atom has existed."?
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The cat is either dead or not, even if we do not know whether it is dead or not.
True. However, some think human knowledge is a factor in the paradox.
Somewhere, in a forest, a squirrel has died. Of that, we can be sure, whether humans visit that forest or not.
Just playing word games (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just playing word games. Atoms aren't empty in the same sense that an occupied house isn't empty no matter how large the house is. Yes, the space is the atom "filled" with electrons in the sense that you cannot add another electron to it.
But in another human common sense view, "being full" means that
space occupied by the atom = size of its constituents
Then the atom is indeed "empty" because the size of the nucleus and the size of the electrons is way way smaller than the size of an atom.
At most, an atom isn't empty in the same sense that with one person living in a 1000 sq ft house (or even a "house" with the size of the Earth), the house "isn't empty". But that is a long way from the house "full".
Trying to argue this from a scientific angle is just as futile as arguing whether the house above is "empty" or not.
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You omitted the quantum foam that exists everywhere.
Last name chronology (Score:3)
She wasn't Kitty Oppenheimer when the movie characters spoke that dialogue. She was married to Richard Harrison at the time and had his last name.
Rambling (Score:2)
What is this, even?
It sounds like seventh-grade physical science gone wrong.
You're talking about multiple fields interacting at both energetic and information-horizon levels, quarks as properties, gluons accepting mass, mass canceling gravity in the Maxwell quaternions, and everthing hanging on a vacuum-structure n-dimentional discretized lattice. At least.
"Uh, Bob, it's not empty you know."
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Is the glass half empty or half full?
It's always full. Air is a thing.
Fine. Statisitcally empty? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Correct. A parallel is the difference between Newton's laws of gravity and Einstein's relativity. If we plug low velocity and low gravitational energy into relativity, we get Newton!
Quantum perspectives (Score:3)
TFA keeps asserting there is massive amounts of empty space and then talks about "quantum clouds" as if they fill up all the space until something looks. It continuously derides useful high level approximations as if the people using them are not fully aware their convenience model does not represent the real thing with perfect fidelity.
"However, interpreting the quantum cloud as probability does not mean it is just a measure of a lack of knowledge about the system. If I left my keys in one of my jacketâ(TM)s two pockets, but I am unsure which one, I may write a probability function with a 50 per cent value at each pocket and zero value at every other point of my office. This function obviously does not imply that my keys are delocalised over the two pockets. It just states my ignorance, which can be easily fixed by checking the jacket."
"When we pile objects on top of each other, what keeps them separated is not their masses but the electric repulsion between the outmost electrons at their touching molecules. (The electrons cannot collapse under pressure due to the Heisenberg uncertainty and Pauli exclusion principles.) Therefore, the electronâ(TM)s electric charge ultimately fills the space."
It all reads like gibberish to me. The only things people actually know about and are able to measure are outcomes of interactions. There are multiple known methods of deriving the exact same results as the schrodinger equation and an infinite number of equally valid interpretations of what any of it means. To draw conclusions about what is actually implied is presently outside the realm of science. You can guess and tell a conformant story you personally like but that's all your doing.
A molecule is a static object without any internal motion. The quantum clouds of all nuclei and electrons remain absolutely still for a molecule with a well-defined energy. Time is irrelevant.
Only in your mind when you define the problem away by ignoring unstable atoms.
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Good ol Quantum religion, make shit up that works until tested, then make up more shit to fit the tests, until you have a model with so many edge cases it takes a thousand years of testing and millions of dollars to disprove.
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The product of lay misunderstanding by way of providing simple answers to complex ideas.
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Yeah. The "dimensions" of an electronic depend on how hard you are pushing them together. The harder you push, the smaller they get. OTOH, that force can be felt over vast differences, so elections must be huge. At least on the order of the distance from a radio telescope to the Voyager spacecraft.
The electrons cannot collapse under pressure due to the Heisenberg uncertainty and Pauli exclusion principles.
These stand a better chance of defining the lower bound of an electron's size. Two electrons cannot occupy the same "quantum state". Which is spin and orbital in an atom. So, by definition, if an atoms orbitals ar
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A molecule is a static object without any internal motion. The quantum clouds of all nuclei and electrons remain absolutely still for a molecule with a well-defined energy. Time is irrelevant.
Only in your mind when you define the problem away by ignoring unstable atoms.
An excellent point. When transformations occur at random according to a temporal probability density function arguing that time is irrelevant is clearly misguided. What he is really saying is that for my purposes (chemical properties of stable atoms) this is the model I like to use.
But, I have to ask ... (Score:3)
so what? (Score:2)
The quantum field of anything fills all of space. Of course in some places it is less than epsilon. So, just semantics.
Meanwhile, molecules vibrate, so wrong on that, too.
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That was a pretty weird statement from a chemist. He seems to have gotten to the time-independent Schrodinger equation and not realized that the name implies there's also a time-dependent version.
60 Hz Ambient field (Score:2)
Just a rough description, but OK (Score:2)
Atoms aren't good but good atomic models are (Score:2)
I'm all for providing students more realistic explanatory models, and do generally have to go beyond textbook descriptions to make that happen.
But the point of such a model is to connect it to their intuition. If you don't care about intuition then just give them the Schrodinger equation and call it a day.
To the end of something a student could realistically sketch or imagine, a completely space-filling model is just ridiculous and would only serve to obscure important details about the real structural comp
IANAP (I am not a physicist) (Score:2)
However, my extremely limited understanding (or rather, intuition) of quantum physics is that all particles come down to a wave function, which is effectively a probability field and that the probabilities are never precisely zero i.e. that there is a non-zero possibility that a particle could be anywhere in the universe. Therefore, unless we are defining "empty" to mean that there is a zero probability of any particle (electron in this case) being present in a volume, then I would posit that what folks mea
My favorite explanation (Score:2)
Therefore, about that cat (Score:2)
Schrodinger's Box is completely full of cat until you observe it, and then there's a solid cat in one corner.
Seems the author doesn't know there's 2 waveforms (Score:4, Insightful)
The Schrödinger equation [wikipedia.org], the heart of this entire argument, has two forms – the time-dependent, and the time-independent. The time-independent is much easier to solve, but is much more general...it's the one that results in the "empty space" concept. Then again, actually visualizing the time dependent one still involves a very small (2e10-10 cm) and very light (9.1093837e10-28 grams) electron appearing at one point in a given space, which reduces that space's mass to as near zero as makes no difference.
Also it's been 25 years since I suffered through CHEM 404: Phys Chem II - Quantum Mechanics, and I'm drunk, so whatever.
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Quantum systems do not exhibit true steady-state behavior due to quantum fluctuations and measurements inducing probabilistic state changes. Look at the quantum foam.