Atoms

[Sara S]

"There are more than than one hundred different types
of atoms, from lightweights like hydrogen and helium
through welterweights like tin and iodine and out to
such mumbling mooseheads as ununpentium and
ununquadium, but they're all much the same nearly nil
size. You can fit more than three atoms in a
nanometer, meaning it would take 10 to the 13th
power, or ten trillion of them, to coat the disk of our
pinhead. And the funny thing about an atom is that its
outlandish smallness is still too big for it: almost all of
its subnanometer span is taken up by empty space.
The real meat of an atom is its core, its nucleus,
which accounts for about 99.9 percent of an atom's
matter. When you step on your bathroom scale, you
are essentially weighing the sum of your atomic
nuclei. If you could strip them all from your body, go on
a total denuclear diet, you'd be down to about twenty
grams, the weight of four nickels, or roughly the weight
of the doornail that you would be as dead as.



"Those remaining twenty grams belong to your
electrons, the fundamental particles that orbit an
atom's nucleus. An electron has less than 1/1,800 the
mass of a simple atomic nucleus. ... Viewed from the
more impressive angle of volumetrics, we see that,
while the nucleus may make up nearly all of an atom's
mass, ... it takes up only a trillionth of its
volume.



"Here it is worth a final reversion to metaphor. If the
nucleus of an atom were a basketball located at the
center of Earth, the electrons would be cherry pits
whizzing about in the outermost layer of Earth's
atmosphere. Between our nuclear [basketball] and the
whizzing pits, there would be no Earth: no iron, nickel,
magma, soil, sea, or sky, ... nothing, literally, to speak
of. ... We live in a universe that is largely devoid of
matter. Yet still the Milky Way glows, and still our
hemoglobin flows, and when we hug our friends, our
fingers don't sink into the vacuum with which all atoms
are filled. If in touching their skin we are touching the
void, why does it feel so complete?"



Natalie Angier, The Canon, Houghton Mifflin,
2007, pp. 85-86.

[Zeno Swijtink]

"There are more than than one hundred different types
of atoms, from lightweights like hydrogen and helium
through welterweights like tin and iodine and out to
such mumbling mooseheads as ununpentium and
ununquadium, but they're all much the same nearly nil
size. You can fit more than three atoms in a
nanometer, meaning it would take 10 to the 13th
power, or ten trillion of them, to coat the disk of our
pinhead. And the funny thing about an atom is that its
outlandish smallness is still too big for it: almost all of
its subnanometer span is taken up by empty space. (...)

Natalie Angier, The Canon, Houghton Mifflin,
2007, pp. 85-86.

Thanks Sara. Great quote and topic.

This contrast between the common sense view of a world of sturdy objects you can lean on, that resist movement, and the scientific world picture of objects consisting mostly of empty space, made up of atoms with small nuclei "circled" at great distance by tiny electron clouds, was made popular in the late 1920 by the astrophysicist Arthur Stanley Eddington in his Gifford Lectures published as The Nature of the Physical World in 1927.


INTRODUCTION

I have settled down to the task of writing these lectures and have drawn up my chairs to my two tables. Two tables! Yes; there are duplicates of every object about me--two tables, two chairs, two pens.

This is not a very profound beginning to a course which ought to reach transcendent levels of scientific philosophy. But we cannot touch bedrock immediately; we must scratch a bit at the surface of things first. And whenever I begin to scratch the first thing I strike is-- my two tables.

One of them has been familiar to me from earliest years. It is a commonplace object of that environment which I call the world. How shall I describe it? It has extension; it is comparatively permanent; it is coloured; above all it is substantial. By substantial I do not merely mean that it does not collapse when I lean upon it; I mean that it is constituted of "substance" and by that word I am trying to convey to you some conception of its intrinsic nature. It is a thing; not like space, which is a mere negation; nor like time, which is--Heaven knows what! But that will not help you to my meaning because it is the distinctive characteristic of a "thing" to have this substantiality, and I do not think substan? tiality can be described better than by saying that it is the kind of nature exemplified by an ordinary table. And so we go round in circles. After all if you are a plain commonsense man, not too much worried with scientific scruples, you will be confident that you under? stand the nature of an ordinary table. I have even heard of plain men who had the idea that they could better understand the mystery of their own nature if scientists would discover a way of explaining it in terms of the easily comprehensible nature of a table.

Table No. 2 is my scientific table. It is a more recent acquaintance and I do not feel so familiar with it. It does not belong to the world previously mentioned-- that world which spontaneously appears around me when I open my eyes, though how much of it is objective and how much subjective I do not here consider. It is part of a world which in more devious ways has forced itself on my attention. My scientific table is mostly emptiness. Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed; but their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself. Notwithstanding its strange construction it turns out to be an entirely efficient table. It supports my writing paper as satis? factorily as table No. 1; for when I lay the paper on it the little electric particles with their headlong speed keep on hitting the underside, so that the paper is maintained in shuttlecock fashion at a nearly steady level. If I lean upon this table I shall not go through; or, to be strictly accurate, the chance of my scientific elbow going through my scientific table is so excessively small that it can be neglected in practical life. Reviewing their properties one by one, there seems to be nothing to choose between the two tables for ordinary purposes; but when abnormal circumstances befall, then my scientific table shows to advantage. If the house catches fire my scientific table will dissolve quite naturally into scientific smoke, whereas my familiar table undergoes a metamorphosis of its substantial nature which I can only regard as miraculous.

There is nothing substantial about my second table It is nearly all empty space--space pervaded, it is true ...

https://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=763098

[PeriodThree]

My kids and I were messing around a few weeks back and figured out that there are 12.6 moles of water molecules in an 8 oz cup of water.

(8oz * 28.4 grams in one ounce divided by the molar mass of water of 18 grams per mole)

1 mole is (roughly) 6 x 10^23, so that cup of water has roughly
7,500,852,000,000,000,000,000,000 individual molecules of H20 (except water is a strange thing, so those individual molecules are often in weird chains and stuff :-)

I think this is roughly correct - but I may have slipped a decimal somewhere...

The number of people on earth is a fun comparison:
6,700,000,000


This powers of ten animation from Nikon is very very cool:
https://www.nikon.com/about/feelnikon/universcale/index.htm

And so is this lecture "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" by Richard Feynman:
https://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.htm

Really big, and really small numbers are so damned cool (I suspect this is further evidence of my fixation or faith in the technological sublime :-)

[SandBar]

Great quote, thanks for letting us know about this book.

And what's even more amazing, all our chemistry is based on the weightless electrons. That means every chemical change that occurs in our bodies is because of the electrons changing places, the nucleus stays put, is unchanged. Our weighty matter holds us together but the whizzing electrons makes life possible.



"There are more than than one hundred different types
of atoms, from lightweights like hydrogen and helium
through welterweights like tin and iodine and out to
such mumbling mooseheads as ununpentium and
ununquadium, but they're all much the same nearly nil
size. You can fit more than three atoms in a
nanometer, meaning it would take 10 to the 13th
power, or ten trillion of them, to coat the disk of our
pinhead. And the funny thing about an atom is that its
outlandish smallness is still too big for it: almost all of
its subnanometer span is taken up by empty space.
The real meat of an atom is its core, its nucleus,
which accounts for about 99.9 percent of an atom's
matter. When you step on your bathroom scale, you
are essentially weighing the sum of your atomic
nuclei. If you could strip them all from your body, go on
a total denuclear diet, you'd be down to about twenty
grams, the weight of four nickels, or roughly the weight
of the doornail that you would be as dead as.



"Those remaining twenty grams belong to your
electrons, the fundamental particles that orbit an
atom's nucleus. An electron has less than 1/1,800 the
mass of a simple atomic nucleus. ... Viewed from the
more impressive angle of volumetrics, we see that,
while the nucleus may make up nearly all of an atom's
mass, ... it takes up only a trillionth of its
volume.



"Here it is worth a final reversion to metaphor. If the
nucleus of an atom were a basketball located at the
center of Earth, the electrons would be cherry pits
whizzing about in the outermost layer of Earth's
atmosphere. Between our nuclear [basketball] and the
whizzing pits, there would be no Earth: no iron, nickel,
magma, soil, sea, or sky, ... nothing, literally, to speak
of. ... We live in a universe that is largely devoid of
matter. Yet still the Milky Way glows, and still our
hemoglobin flows, and when we hug our friends, our
fingers don't sink into the vacuum with which all atoms
are filled. If in touching their skin we are touching the
void, why does it feel so complete?"



Natalie Angier, The Canon, Houghton Mifflin,
2007, pp. 85-86.