We Are Barely Here

You recall your elementary school science don't you?  Matter has been determined to be composed of molecules, with further chemical bond subdivisions of atoms, which are further composed of a solid nucleus (protons and neutrons being the residents) and electron "cloud".

Let's take that farther thanks to the science associated with Quantum Mechanics. Until the early 20th century, the prevailing sentiment was that atoms were solid. But, in 1910, the famous chemist, Ernest Rutherford redefined the atomic idea with his discovery that an atom's mass is relegated to the nucleus, with a relatively empty outer charged shell (electrons have an infinitesimally small mass). It has been illustrated that if one imagines the nucleus of an average atom magnified to the size of a large city, the nucleus would only be the size of a grain of sand. As the twentieth-century British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington put it, matter is 99.9999999999999% empty space. It has been said that if you could remove the empty space, then all the subatomic particles of all the humans' atoms on the planet could be contained in the volume of a thimble or a sugar cube.  Indeed, we are barely here. In fact, "solid" is really an illusion.

How does this play out in the real world? When you touch a solid object, you don't really touch it - that is, you don't feel the solid mass of the matter. Rather, the competing orbiting electron fields (that defines the atom's "size") gives the appearance of a solid object. What happens is an "electrostatic repulsion" between the electrons of your finger and those of the table.

Want to get even weirder? Look at the notion of weight (a measure of the force of gravity...which is a phenomenon of space fabric) upon matter, which is directly measured by its mass, which we have illustrated is almost nil. Or, the theoretical "graviton", a particle having no mass and no charge that carries the gravitational force.  Or, look at "dark energy" ('dark' as in unknown), of which 72% or more of the universe is estimated to be comprised - with its "negative gravity" / "gravitational repulsive" quality, used to explain the accelerating rate of expansion of the universe. And "dark matter", at 23% of The Universe - the "cosmic glue" that keeps galaxies together, seen by its gravitation actions on stars' orbits.

"Weird Wacky Stuff"

- Johnny Carson