I’m having an existential crisis - any scientists around

[xeran]

I read something I’m DDs science book which said that 99.99% of all atoms are made up of dead space. If that is true and we and everything around us is made up of atoms...how is everything solid? It said if we collapsed all the atoms inside ourselves we could fit in a particle of dust 👀

This can’t be true?

It is true, I think. The reason the whole thing holds solid is because electromagnetic charge. You know the way magnets repel.. Well electrons, which are part of atoms, do similar.
Can you telling not a scientist

Tell I'm not, that should say

Electrostatic force (or coulombic force).

chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/18508/what-holds-atoms-together

But we’re not actually made of anything solid, when you get down to the bare building blocks? Just a fuckton of magnets repelling each other?!

Oh I feel all weird now

Is it stupid I just tried pushing my fingers together to see how solid they are?

It’s fun isn’t it. It’s mostly empty space and there isn’t even any clean boundary between the bits that do exist.

It isn’t fun 👀

We’re not SOLID ffs

It's true.

Electrons whizzing around so fast give the impression of solid matter. Think of a fan. When the blades are still you can see the space. When moving you can't.

If there was no empty space then everything from planet earth could fit on a teaspoon :D

STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT

That’s enough internet for me tonight

Also, if we’re made of atoms, and atoms always follow the laws of physics, then do we actually have free will?

Yes, it is a bit freaky if you think about it too much. But there are tiny force fields keeping each particle the right distance apart, so it's actually OK.

Go outside. Look up into the night sky. All those tiny dots that are vast stars. All those galaxies. The vastness of the universe. And realise that we are so insignificantly tiny that it really doesn't matter if we're solid or not.

Isn't physics baffling? :o I don't quite get it but i love it.

The bit that really does my but in is that once you get to the level of subatomic particles - protons, neutrons, electrons - then everything is made up of the same stuff, just in different ratios. Like say steel is made of iron mostly, but iron is made of protons neutrons and electrons. And we are made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen plus some small change, but all those elements are made up of protons neutrons and electrons. So we are basically made of the same stuff as a table or a car or diamonds or shampoo or the air.

I left the curtain open the other night and, as we have dark skies where I live, watched the stars moving across the sky as the hours passed. Then realised that no, it's me that's moving. I am circling round the sun on my little planet, which is also spinning round on its axis!

Dh just pointed out that as the entire earth’s ‘solid’ matter could fit on a teaspoon, it actually wouldn’t, because if we got rid of dead space, the teaspoon would be exponentially less useful. Or locateable.

If you think that' mind blowing you should look into superstring theory.

If we could perfectly align and synch our atoms we could walk through a wall. Makes star trek style transporters seem more feasible. Weird though thinking that all our thoughts and memories are just a collection of atoms.

In reality though, all the "empty" space isn't really empty, it's full of quark-gluon field fluctuations. It would take a huge amount of energy to create a truly empty space and it would be pretty unstable.

Of course we are solid! We meet all the definitions of a solid (do not flow, do not diffuse etc).

We are like really strong meccano, except our links are not screws but strong electrostatic intermolecular forces.

I'd be happy if all the fat I had fitted into a teaspoon

arguably, there's no such thing as matter, just energy fields. Hence why the theory of the big bang is so elegant, it started from nothing, and beget nothing - just forms of energy which could all just be the same thing that we perceive in different ways.

Don’t start thinking about it. Then you have to think about how everything looks and sounds as well. Because what everything looks like is just your eyes’ interpretation of light bouncing off things. Solid is just your interpretation of what touching something feels like. Your brain creates a version of the world through your senses that isn’t “what is really there”, it’s just what you can perceive and interact with. So dark matter is passing through you constantly, but you don’t interact with it, so it’s irrelevant. Lots of other spectrums of light that you can’t see with your limited vision.

Alien life forms could interpret everything completely differently from us, but in a way that made the universe equally workable and was equally valid.

Solid, liquid, gas; it’s all in your head! I mean, it’s real, but your world is just you making sense of what is there in order to be able to do the things you need to do to reproduce yourself and continue the cycle.

Oh I do love threads like this. Perception is fascinating and the thought that we all experience the world in our own way so which is the true version of any of the things we experience.

It's a bit early for me to be thinking about it though.

Free will?
Do we have this, or is everything we do decided, not by some divine plan, but just as an output of an equation of cause and effect (which is too big for us to see all the variables)?