File photo: A microscopic photo of a sheet of glass only two atoms thick blends with an artist's conception to show the structural rendering. (Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science)
Posted on 01/06/2020 6:31:49 AM PST by Red Badger
No one really knows what happens inside an atom. But two competing groups of scientists think they've figured it out. And both are racing to prove that their own vision is correct.
Here's what we know for sure: Electrons whiz around "orbitals" in an atom's outer shell. Then there's a whole lot of empty space. And then, right in the center of that space, there's a tiny nucleus — a dense knot of protons and neutrons that give the atom most of its mass. Those protons and neutrons cluster together, bound by what's called the strong force. And the numbers of those protons and neutrons determine whether the atom is iron or oxygen or xenon, and whether it's radioactive or stable.
Still, no one knows how those protons and neutrons (together known as nucleons) behave inside an atom. Outside an atom, protons and neutrons have definite sizes and shapes. Each of them is made up of three smaller particles called quarks, and the interactions between those quarks are so intense that no external force should be able to deform them, not even the powerful forces between particles in a nucleus. But for decades, researchers have known that the theory is in some way wrong. Experiments have shown that, inside a nucleus, protons and neutrons appear much larger than they should be. Physicists have developed two competing theories that try to explain that weird mismatch, and the proponents of each are quite certain the other is incorrect. Both camps agree, however, that whatever the correct answer is, it must come from a field beyond their own.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
File photo: A microscopic photo of a sheet of glass only two atoms thick blends with an artist's conception to show the structural rendering. (Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science)
“Can I buy some pot from you?”
Unsettled science.
My guess is the Protons and Neutrons are vibrating inside the nucleus but are constrained by the electron cloud, which magnifies their appearance...........
As again the last window we manage to pry open reveals a reality with more questions than we had before that window was opened.
The universe can’t ever be fully explained - it’s like an infinite onion; layers within layers, within layers ad infinitum.
The Finger of God .... why don’t negative electrons collapse into positive protons in the nucleus ?
There is always the question “What is that made of?”
The title is the best part of the article.
centripetal force?.................
an infinite onion; layers within layers, within layers ad infinitum.
It’s turtles all the way down.
The Pauli Exclusion Principle is, I believe, the main reason.
That’s usually t he way it is.
Like the burger you get at Burger King never looks like the one in the poster in the window..............
From the Wikipedia page on the Pauli Exclusion Principle:
"It has been shown that the Pauli exclusion principle is responsible for the fact that ordinary bulk matter is stable and occupies volume. This suggestion was first made in 1931 by Paul Ehrenfest, who pointed out that the electrons of each atom cannot all fall into the lowest-energy orbital and must occupy successively larger shells. Atoms, therefore, occupy a volume and cannot be squeezed too closely together.["
lol
I figure i’ll just wait until i die to find out all the answers to these tough ones :)
I wake up every morning from a very vivid dream, with tremors and headaches. Every morning for 11 years since a head injury.
The rest of the day after the first half hour recovery is fine.
Docs don’t have a CLUE as to why this happens.
I’d like an answer to that in this lifetime.
But the partial answer is even the sleep/wake cycle is Incredibly complex and something like this is hard to figure out.
God made such complex things in a perfect state and it’s hard to get things back to that perfect state once they are damaged or interrupted.
It’s a beautiful thing, actually, the complexity of something as simple as waking up.
The atom is a beautiful thing also. And complex.
Any attempt to observe something that small will disrupt the target. Thee nice pictures are only speculation.
Electrons in the atom do enter the nucleus. In fact, electrons in the s states tend to peak at the nucleus. Electrons are not little balls that can fall into the nucleus under electrostatic attraction. Rather, electrons are quantized wavefunctions that spread out in space and can sometimes act like particles in limited ways. An electron in an atom spreads out according to its energy. The states with more energy are more spread out. All electron states overlap with the nucleus, so the concept of an electron “falling into” or “entering” the nucleus does not really make sense. Electrons are always partially in the nucleus.
If the question was supposed to ask, “Why don’t electrons in the atom get localized in the nucleus?” then the answer is still “they do”. Electrons can get localized in the nucleus, but it takes an interaction to make it happen. The process is known as “electron capture” and it is an important mode of radioactive decay. In electron capture, an atomic electron is absorbed by a proton in the nucleus, turning the proton into a neutron. The electron starts as a regular atomic electron, with its wavefunction spreading through the atom and overlapping with the nucleus. In time, the electron reacts with the proton via its overlapping portion, collapses to a point in the nucleus, and disappears as it becomes part of the new neutron. Because the atom now has one less proton, electron capture is a type of radioactive decay that turns one element into another element.
If the question was supposed to ask, “Why is it rare for electrons to get localized in the nucleus?” then the answer is: it takes an interaction in the nucleus to completely localize an electron there, and there is often nothing for the electron to interact with. An electron will only react with a proton in the nucleus via electron capture if there are too many protons in the nucleus. When there are too many protons, some of the outer protons are loosely bound and more free to react with the electron. But most atoms do not have too many protons, so there is nothing for the electron to interact with. As a result, each electron in a stable atom remains in its spread-out wavefunction shape. Each electron continues to flow in, out, and around the nucleus without finding anything in the nucleus to interact with that would collapse it down inside the nucleus. It’s a good thing too, because if electron capture was more common, matter would not be stable but would collapse down to a handful of nuclei.
https://wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2013/08/08/why-dont-electrons-in-the-atom-enter-the-nucleus/
Long ago I opined that space and matter alike only exist as a consequence of time, as a differential between states in time as time flows through an energy field, and that dimensionality is not a given and that matter as organized energy, energy that is puffed up volume wise by means of its structure, is actually less dense unorganized energy.
It may sound strange but that view also works with the notion that we exist inside a black hole, that the moment any black hole achieves singularity it internally erupts into a “universe” that creates structure and dimensionality within it, causing it to seemingly expand to any outside observer, throwing off their calculations of its mass if they are trying to infer those by its indirectly observed event horizon of some such.
Of course I’ve also joked that there is no dark matter or dark energy, just that a large part of the otherwise observable universe is trying to hide itself from Earth, the cosmic epicenter of Ideological Stupid (now festered into the current state of progressivism), as well as move away from us as fast as they can.
Wuzzat? I’ve BS’d today and don’t get my unemployment drachmas from Bea Arthur?
“The Finger of God .... why don’t negative electrons collapse into positive protons in the nucleus ?”
That was one of the main questions that led to the concept of quantum mechanics. Classical physics failed to explain exactly that problem...
My point is that question does not end with new scientific revelations; the field for that question expands beyond what we envisioned when we asked the question and thought we were finding an answer. We find the answer we discovered is tiny compared to all sorts of new questions that answer opened up.
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