(January 17, 2017 at 7:28 pm)Huggy74 Wrote: We perceive our world as "reality" even though 99.9 percent of it is empty space. As the saying goes, if you remove all that empty space, you would be able to compress all of humanity into the size of a sugar cube...
Huggy,
Please don't ever repeat this. It's simply bullshit. This is by no means a theist/atheist issue. In fact there are plenty of atheists mesmerized by the thought. It is however a science literacy issue.
People enamored by this apparent quandary should brush up on their knowledge of electromagnetism. Coulomb repulsion will satisfy most inquiries. Those delving deeper and wanting to know what happens as we try to squeeze two atoms together will then have to address Pauli's exclusion principle.
This of course ignores that matter is not mostly empty space to begin with. Some of this stems from the fact that many people still cling to how the Bohr model is used to teach young children the structure of the atom leaving the impression of electrons existing as tiny satellites orbiting the nucleus and all that empty space. In "reality", as you put it, that empty space is filled with electron wave functions.
I always love the sugar cube or teaspoon references when providing estimates for the total space occupied when only the actual partical dimensions are considered. Mildly amusing, no doubt, but then I'm quickly left with trying to comprehend the energy required to remove all the so called "empty space". For me, that's the real mind fuck.
