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Secret Worlds: The Universe Within

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hillsbororiver:

Take a penny out of your pocket or piggy bank and give it a good look, a fairly small and unspectacular piece of metal but did you know that this penny contains about 28,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 copper atoms?

As you ponder this throw in the fact that these atoms are 99.99% empty space, actually I could have thrown in a few more 9's after the decimal point but you get my drift.

Pretty amazing stuff isn't it?

Peace,

Joe

Sorin:
Wow, Joe! That is amazing stuff, indeed.

hillsbororiver:
Hi Sorin,

Did you see this in the other thread?  http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/atom/

(From the above link)

And you thought there was a lot of empty space in the solar system. Well, there's even more nothing inside an atom. A hydrogen atom is only about a ten millionth of a millimeter in diameter, but the proton in the middle is a hundred thousand times smaller, and the electron whizzing around the outside is a thousand times smaller than THAT. (Be sure to check out the scale in the link provided)The rest of the atom is empty. I tried to picture it, and I couldn't. So I put together this page - and I still can't picture it.

The page is scaled so that the smallest thing on it, the electron, is one pixel. That makes the proton, this big ball right next to us, a thousand pixels across, and the distance between them is... yep, fifty million pixels (not a hundred million, because we're only showing the radius of the atom. ie: from the middle to the edge). If your monitor displays 72 pixels to the inch, then that works out to eleven miles - making this possibly the biggest page you've ever seen (I personally have seen one that was set up to be even bigger, though its exact size did not seem to represent anything specific).

I recommend trying to scroll from here to the right a screen at a time, just to see how long it takes the little thumb in the scrollbar to move visibly. True masochists can try to scroll through the whole eleven miles - but the scenery along the way is pretty bleak.

I used to think that things like rocks and buildings and my own skeleton were fairly solid. But they're made up of atoms, and atoms, as you can see here, contain so little actual material that they can barely be said to exist.

We are all phantoms.

(Note: users of older versions of Internet Explorer may not be able to scroll manually all the way to the right edge. If you want to actually see the electron, you may need to click HERE. Oddly, for some other users, this link will not work. Hopefully there is no one for whom both are true.)

Amazing stuff!

Peace,

Joe

Sorin:
Wow Joe!...amazing stuff! Thanks.

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