We're Made Up of A Lot of Empty Space

I find more practical the analogy:
Utah = atom
Car = proton
lentil = electron

Yet when i hit another car, i don't go through it....

I'm not touching my screen resolution.

"Matter is almost completely insubstantial. Atoms are more like a thought, or a concentrated bit of information".

there is no way its as big as space..that can't even be possible...?

Kevin, you should correct this phrase:

"At scale, the web page actually stretches out, and separates the proton from the electronic by 11 miles."

It's "electron" and not "electronic", of course.

Ah, the strange world of physics. Things like this remind me why I study it ~

Electrons can also tell whether you are observing them as a particle or wave, and switch how they behave as a result. But that is another story

Also, this is a picture of the planet Neptune, taken by Voyager 2 in 1989.
Though it is true that matter is essentially made of empty space, the analogy between electron orbits and planetary orbits is barely fit for 6th graders.

If we are 99.9999% empty space one might argue that we hardly exist at all.... and yet a few hundred milligrams of matter converted into energy destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima. A teaspoon of neutron star material weighs about a billion tons and so the amount of empty space would be far less.

They didn't actually get a picture of a proton though.... impossible!

It only seems like a lot of empty space because of the frame of reference to the proton and electron. You could do the same thing with the Sun and the Earth when viewing the Milky Way Galaxy. It's actually not that awe inspiring really. What's awe inspiring is how it all came to be.

Ummmm this is not new at all? I remember this theory except it was one pee (the vegetable) in a football stadium. Freshman year of highschool, I don't understand why it's particularly news worthy, but not the less food for thought.

WOW. This is intriguing. As an average person, I know there is some space between proton and electron but never ever imagine it would be this wide.

And we are created using this? And still we feel 50 liters of water is pretty heavy? LOL..we are so weak actually. 50 liters of these empty space LMAO.

1 question...if electron keep orbiting proton at constant pace, infinitely, where did it get its energy to do so?

Have been wondering this one since school

expertester: I'm no expert at this (see what i did there?) but I would assume it is because of the positive/negative charge of the proton/electron that the elctron orbits the protron

"Orbit" is really the not the correct word to use when describing an electron and proton interacting. After all, accelerating charges radiate, and for the electron to stay in an orbit it would have to be continually accelerating (think centripetal acceleration). If an electron were to orbit in the classical physics sense, it would rapidly radiate away sufficient energy that it would crash into the proton, which of course isn't what happens. Instead, quantum mechanics is necessary to describe the system. In the parlance of quantum, supposing the electron has a definite energy it's said to be in a stationary state, or energy eigenstate (for the mathematically inclined, its wavefunction is an eigenfunction of the Hamiltonian operator). When the electron is in such an energy eigenstate it will not have a clearly defined position. In this sense it's misleading to say the electron is at any particular distance; in fact upon measurement the electron could be found at *any* distance if it's in the ground state. This indeterminate position is what gives rise to the 'electron cloud,' as it's presented in high school chemistry. What's represented here is ostensibly the average distance found when measuring an ensemble of atoms in identically prepared states (i.e. the expectation value of the position operator), and presumably only for the ground state of the hydrogen atom. By exciting the electron to a higher energy state, the expectation value of its distance from the proton increases. In the case of very high energy states (close to the ionization energy) atoms can become extremely large, even on the order of microns, or thousandths of a millimeter (these are called Rydberg atoms). In that case, the electron would be a whole lot farther away... In fact, if the above scale is correct the electron would be about 1/3 the way to the moon. So what is it that makes matter feel so solid? As it turns out, it's the electromagnetic force. This force is unfathomably large in comparison with gravity... Consider that the magnetic interaction (which is already of relativistic origin, and generally small next to Coulomb interaction) from a tiny fridge magnet can overcome the gravitational interaction with the entire earth when lifting a paperclip. Gravity only seems to dominate because there is no negative mass particle like there are negatively charged particles to cancel out positive charges, so there are long-range gravitational forces in everyday life. Isn't science great?

^ what he said, except i can sum it all up with

God made it that way.

G.O.D. made it (Giver Of Data)

Truth be told, it's funny how we as the human race think we have such a broad understanding of our universe's inner workings yet we can barely escape our own atmosphere.

The latest theory is that gravitational force is so weak relative to other forces because it is an active force in simultaneous dimensions. Yeah, have you seen Fringe?

All I'm saying is that we can grab at straws and perceive a break through every now and then, but we will never have the ability to completely understand this universe, it transcends our level of understanding and perspective.

I love how people are so eager in this day and age to completely neglect the possibility of divine creation with such little understanding of the universe that we do have. I mean isn't it possible? If you would accept that life could form from inanimate matter? Really? Isn't that about as amazing a concept as a Creator?

@shan: Better to keep our options open through science than accepting blindly thousands year old fairy-tales. Divinity is a human concept, invented by the "flawed" us.

In response to shan and Andrei, I'd like to put forth that whether or not you believe in some sort of creator, science should most certainly still be done. In shan's case, it becomes almost a form of worship; it's an attempt to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of the creator's creation, to understand it (and by extension him) as best we can. Personally, I'm convinced a creator is not necessary. Throughout the history of humanity gods have been tasked with the responsibility of making possible things that we don't understand. As science has progressed, the role of the gods in our understanding of the universe has correspondingly diminished. No one believes that lightning is actually hurled from Olympus by Zeus, or that Apollo is up there pulling the sun around in his chariot any more. Now, we're at the point where shan claims that science can't describe how life could arise from inanimate matter, and so tasks the creation of life to a 'creator.' I'm of the opinion that science has already gone an incredibly long ways in answering this question, and that the details that are left are certainly understandable scientifically, we just don't understand them yet. But this is a smaller piece of what I truly believe. This argument has been going on for thousands of years, and at any point in time religious people say that science will never answer a particular question. But it keeps answering more questions! Yes, there are things we can't yet understand from a scientific basis right now, but over and over we find out that it's not a failing of science, or metaphysical naturalism, it's just that we haven't gotten there yet. There's no reason to believe that *this* time, science really will be stumped; that's been said forever and it's just as wrong now as it was when it was claimed that science couldn't understand how the earth came to be. Either way, whatever you want to believe, science should be done, by both the religious and the naturalists. The only people who think doing science or extending our understanding of the world (within reasonable ethical bounds, of course) is a bad thing are those clinging to ancient beliefs that science has already shot down. Believing in a creator is still a tenable position (but only because science doesn't *yet* have a complete understanding of the origin of the universe), but believing that the earth was created in 6 days some thousands of years ago is emphatically not. It's no more defensible than the belief that Zeus is hurling thunderbolts from Olympus. Sure, you can make them both purely allegorical and try to extract some perspective from each (as mainstream Christianity has done with the genesis myth), but that doesn't make either true, it just further accentuates the fact that they are human constructions made by ancient minds with less of an understanding of the world than we currently have. That said, as far as I'm concerned, believe what you want, up until the point where that belief requires enforced ignorance. At that point it becomes destructive both to individuals and society.

And all of that ignores the pragmatic motivations for science. Yes, some of the weirder results of quantum mechanics make it seem like quantum happens in a different world, from which we're all detached, but it doesn't. In fact everyone reading this right now is relying on it many times over in the operation of their computer, for instance in the hard drive read head, which uses giant magnetoresistance, a manifestly quantum phenomenon. If we hadn't pushed forward scientifically, tried to understand the world on increasingly fundamental levels, we'd be a long ways behind where we are now. There, see, I tied it back to computers so it's a legit post...

^ I would agree with most of what he said. Obviously has done some study.

Graduating from BYU with a BS in biology, specifically molecular bio, I have learned that 170 years of evolution still hasn't answered how we all got here. Not only that, but the organic evolutionary theory that Darwin proposed has been scientifically disproved hundreds of times over. Evolution as we understand it now, is nothing like (not even close) to what Darwin-and many other early evolutionists claimed was absolute truth.

I don't believe that all religion has all truth. On the other hand I certainly don't believe that all science has it either.

Methal, don't forget that science isn't any particular fact or model or theory, but rather the process by which that understanding was arrived at. The fact that we now know more, and that portions of Darwin's evolution have been revised and extended (although I'd disagree that modern evolution is "not even close" to Darwin's version, it's merely extended by a long way) isn't a failing of science, it's a triumph.

Science (Engineering ) FTW

expertester: thats actually not a hard question, its a law of nature(according to science) that everything will keep moving if nothing interrupts it, when we drive a bike, what stops us, when we stop pedaling is friction both in form of air resisitance and the resistance from wheels and so on, but at the scale of a single proton, there isnt any airfriction as theres completely empty, just as our solar system. or any solar system

Very interesting! Physics has always managed to capture my imagination in particular the wave-particle duality and its implications it could have on what we perceive as reality.

@ceejer: I appreciate your insight and I truly understand where your opinions is coming from. Scientifically speaking, I share your opinion wholeheartedly. But, in terms of fairy tales and religion, please remember that religion is man made. I can understand how the bible was written, but you have to use some logic based on the level of understanding of the people at the time. A good comparison is studying calculus or let's even say differential equations. If you immediately turn towards the end of the textbook, those concepts seem so unattainable, but if you start with the most basic concepts once you get towards the end you can now fully understand it. The people at the time could never understand science in the way that we do, so things were revealed to them at a primitive level.

To me the Bing Bang is the epitome of creation for it's when the universe was created and thus all things came into being. In my opinion, there is a strong possibility of a divine creator that made the universe. I believe that this creator set up the system and all if its laws, yes, even evolution. I suggest you read the book "A Case for a Creator" to see all the scientific evidence that points toward a creator. Even Einstein believe in a creator.