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Tue 21 Sep, 2004 09:51 pm
Since atoms are mostly empty space, and since electrons are really just charges existing as a cloud of probability around a nucleus, and since protons and neutrons are just combinations of quarks in a similar probabilistic state, is there anything "solid" in the universe at all, or is it all just little tiny spherical fields interacting with each other giving the illusion of solidity?
All is bumping electrons.
Potential, interacting.
Still, all seems pretty solid to me.
We don't know if "solid" is a possibility in our reality or just a perception. For that you'd need to really need to understand what reality is all the forces and partices, time and space to the n-th degree, and be confident there was no more subtle underlying reality below our current theoretical models or reality that changed everything.
Why do you care - it may be decades, millennia before we know - or we may never know!
And as Albert Einstein once told a class of Cliffies as a guest lecturer, if you took a bunch of Harvard men and put them at the end of a gymnasium and put an equal number of Radcliffe women at the other end and had them approach each other each time moving half way toward each other, theoritically they would never reach.
But in the words of Einstein: "They would get close enough for all practicle purposes."
Sorry for the Spelling:
I believe the story was told by Dr. Einstein specifically to define what he meant by the expression: "For all practical purposes."
Adrian wrote:All is bumping electrons.
Potential, interacting.
Still, all seems pretty solid to me.
You should shorten this and make a "physics-ku."