Physicsguys: Imagining the Empty Space in an Atom (1 Viewer)

[cstu]

I watched the documentary 'Uranium: Twisting the Dragon's Tail' (great show, Part 1, Part 2) and have been doing a lot of reading about atoms, quarks, etc. trying to wrap my mind around it. Then I came across a site that showed that a carbon atom's radius (from the nucleus to the electron)  is 28,000 times the radius of its nucleus.

Wondered what that would be like viewed from the surface of the Earth looking out into space and it would be 110 million miles (radius of earth (3,959 miles times 28,000) - more than the distance to the sun (98 million miles).  Now imagine the next planet (nucleus) is more another sun's distance away from the Earth.

 

[GregR]

The total perspective vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.

To explain - since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically to annoy his wife.

Trin Tragula - for that was his name - was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex - just to show her.

And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a single piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

 

[Binky The Doormat]

 

[Koya]

We are made of mostly nothing.

Guess god had a limited budget for mass... and ended up getting what he paid for.

 

[Captain Cranks]

I always had a difficult time understanding the density of black holes (like how can all the matter in the earth be squished into the size of a golf ball) until I learned how empty atoms were.

A somewhat related factoid:  It's not density that keeps us from falling through the floor, but electro magnetic repulsion between the atoms in our feet and the atoms in the floor.  

 

[Captain Cranks]

Two things I have a hard time comprehending:

1. How big the biggest things are

2. How small the smallest things are

One stat that always amazes me when I ponder it:  Light travels approximately 6 trillion miles a year.  Yet it takes light 100,000 years just to cross our galaxy... And that galaxy is 1 of an estimated 200 - 500 billion galaxies.  WTF?