We are not mostly empty space
medium.com
medium.com
In this usage, space itself (the 'empty' space of the article's title) is implicitly not something.
This usage may seem to be an accidental issue of language, resulting from an incomplete understanding of physics, but a lot of metaphysics seems to reach the point of hanging on such definitions. One may, of course, agree with both of the points of view expressed in this paragraph.
Even a neutron star is practically invisible to neutrinos which can easily pass through it despite it's being "filled" with neutrons.
So in one respect it’s completely empty but in another it’s totally full.
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...
Granted, I don't really understand the details of what this means, but that's what I remember of the current science.
Most physicists would likely say that there's no point trying to visualize this stuff in mundane terms. Or at least, that's what they were saying the last time I took a physics course.
But what about this?
On a related note, as a physics grad, I've been looking into growing evidence that shows consciousness affecting what we observe (i.e. wave-particle duality in this case).
Have you seen Steven Greer's latest film (CE5)?
I think you make less commitments of space this way.
But you might also think, “this eyebrow is hairs with not too much space between.”, or “this box is hydrogen and oxygen without too much space between.”
An eyebrow is hairs with a certain spatial density and distance (space) from the eyes. Water is hydrogen and oxygen with relatively less space between than say water vapor.
If I think of space as a magnitude, all the math and forces still work out, but there is “room” for other stuff.
But there are other trade-offs.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/coder-physicists-are-simulati...
>If you took an atomic nucleus and bound only one electron to it, you would see the following 10 probability clouds for each electron, where these 10 diagrams correspond to the electron occupying each of the 1s, 2s, 2p, 3s, 3p, 3d, 4s, 4p, 4d and 4f orbitals, respectively. The electron is never located in one specific place at one particular time, but rather exists in a cloud-like or fog-like state, spread throughout a volume of space representing the entire atom.
If there is no boundary, then the universe itself would be full by that field definition because every electron would be at any point by a very small probability.
Try it.
Is it? I'd say empty space is empty space whether it can be filled or not.
If the universe was just 2 plates N meters apart that was impossible to move any closer (e.g. because of opposite forces, like with magnets which work fine in a vacuum), the space between them would still make sense to call empty...
Though technically correct when sticking to matter, it feels so wrong because of how it encourages inapplicable intuitions from the macroscopic world.
"We are mostly empty space" is used as trivia, with an implicit exclamation mark suggesting it is astonishing and significant, but it is intentionally incomplete and lacks context - the whole picture shows something far more substantial that has nothing to do with our macroscopic intuitions.
There's nothing that suggests electrons are a cloud. Yes, a "cloud" defines the probability where they can be found, but electron doesn't occupy the cloud.
Electron is always a point, no matter what wave function it has. Therefore, from this perspective space is all empty.
If you invoke path integrals and infinitely many things bubbling in and out of existence, space suddenly fills up. But the author doesn't even mention that.
If you want to understand this stuff, read up Feynman's descriptions & lectures on QED.
Downvote for this article (sorry).
That depends on what interpretation you're going with. Even with that caveat, I'd be surprised if most physicists would agree with that statement. Electrons are in fact described by the wave function. It's not that the wave function tells us where the electron is, but that the best way of describing the reality of the electron is through its wave function. How and why measurements seem to cause that wave function to collapse to a definite location is different depending on your interpretation of QM.
Something being "empty" or "full" all depends on spatial and energetic scale.
visible light definitely gets through me when I put my hand in front of a bright light source
If "empty" means "I can put electrons in there", then it takes more binding energy to pack more electrons into the same space. If you want to pack more electrons in, you have to squeeze harder.
Example: you can confine an electron to a tiny part of an atom (electrons in inner shells of heavy atoms, for example) but those electrons are very tightly bound (held in by very high ionization energies).
Or the "emptiness" of an atom could be measured using neutral particles, which don't interact with the electrons at all and sail right through as if the electrons were empty space.
For what it's worth this is normal sophomore physics. There's no way to just dismiss it. But there's also no way to claim it's less than a hundred years old.
Right off the top, it's made clear this author doesn't know what he or she is talking about. From at least the time of de Moivre, around 1740, the problem of estimating an accurate true value from multiple differing measurements was recognized in its own right as a problem. By 1810, Gauss and Laplace had discovered the basics of statistical estimation, the form of the normal distribution, results including the central limit theorem, and regression techniques such as non-linear weighted least squares. Now, almost 200 years later, the problem still exists, and is being worked on in various forms and circumstances.
To give a simple example, take 1000 frames of well-exposed video of a still scene, with constant illumination, and constant exposure settings on the camera. Now try to estimate how many photons, within a constant multiplicative factor, are coming from each point in the scene. Most of the measurements will show a normal distribution, but at the extremes of exposure, something more complex is going on (perhaps to do with sensor non-linearity, censored sampling, or something else). This is one of the basic theoretical problems in HDR imaging, and is an active area research (i.e. unsolved, as of today).
It's very hard to get past that paragraph -- which is the first one in answer to the question "why?".
One on hand, electrons as point particles sure sounds empty enough. On the other hand, the fields fill everything.
But on the gripping hand, you could set the volume of the electron to something ludicrously large, like the volume of a proton, then use the charge distribution of whatever "orbital" to trade that charge for an equivalent amount of proton-volume, as sort of a percentage filled of unit volume ... integrate, and you could get a sense of the density.
That, I think, is about as fair as you could ask for when dealing with point particles that are still smeared around.
To the point about "pure space"- I suspect the colloquial answer is that there isn't any pure/just space. I know that Wolfram is also not respected on here much but I like his- not intentionally metaphorical- arrival at a story for space being a process.
Even if you'd take just one electron, its cloud is infinite. Like, really, when people talk about things like shape of the cloud, what they mean is the density of the cloud, or the shape that you get when you only take the region where the density exceeds some arbitrary level.
So, from this perspective, as long as at least one electron exists in the universe, there is no empty place in the universe. Because, with infinitesimal probability, the electron could be anywhere.
Obviously, this is NOT what we mean by emptiness in everyday life.
(The article is okay, but its title is pure clickbait.)
What does that mean? Most interpretations of quantum mechanics consider the wave function to be an abstraction to model the system, not something that is actually tangible. Even in theories that consider it real (e.g. De Broglie-Bohm) it acts as some sort of field, not something that actually occupies space.
It's relative to your perception of it, but physics doesn't care about what pattern your neurological impulses have in relation to matter.
I may be misinterpreting, but it sounds like he's saying all atoms are 1 ångström in diameter.
What is it about Medium that produces less than stellar articles? Because it is a paid blogging service so people just blow out some smoke and hope to make a little money?
So we are mostly electron clouds... and clouds by definition are mostly empty space.
> look, you're not just empty space > just kidding! yeah you are
Atoms are mostly "empty space" in the same way that the gap between a maglev train and its track is empty space (ignoring the air).
Atoms are fuzzy things without a hard interface boundary. At that scale it doesn't really make sense to say they have a "perimeter" at all. The distance at which they repel each other is different from the distance at which they cling together in a hydrogen bond, which is different from the distance between covalently bonded atoms, etc. The electrons themselves roam all over the place, including far outside whatever bond distance you might choose as the size of an atom. In short, there isn't a perimeter which defines "inside" and "outside" of the atom.
The "empty space" thing is a bit of a poor analogy anyway. It comes from chemical experiments which showed that the repulsive cross section of an atom when pummeled with zero-charge particles is orders of magnitude smaller than the electric cross section. These are different forces though (strong vs electromagnetic), so it's a bit apples-to-oranges to begin with.
At the scales our brains are familiar with we experience "emptiness" as a kind of space which can have things placed in it. A chair is empty if you can sit on it, a box is empty if you can put something in it. The sub-atomic "empty" space is filled with fields of various kinds. You could not place something where those fields are. The spaces are not empty.
When you fill a box with things, you are filling it with sub-atomic fields.
Shoot a neutral particle through that cloud and you generally find it really was empty. Wave particle duality doesn’t mean a particle is in every location, just that it could be in every location. After detection you generally find all the places it was not.
And wave particle duality could mean that a particle is a wave when it's not being detected.
> Inside your body, you aren’t mostly empty space. You’re mostly a series of electron clouds, all bound together by the quantum rules that govern the entire Universe.
> So we are mostly electron clouds... and clouds by definition are mostly empty space.
But empty space isn't .. er .. empty ...
My point is that one cannot settle this sort of issue by invoking the definition of words. I am not sure what sort of fallacy the 'argument by dictionary definition' is, but it is definitely a fallacy (except possibly in lexicography.)