I'd turn it around and say that our everyday concept of things having volume comes from the electrostatic forces binding the object together and also those repelling other things.
When you touch an object your finger does not go through the object because the electron cloud on the outside of your finger repels the electron cloud on the outside of the object because both have the same charge.
So in a way electrons are volume, even though you can't really say what's the volume of an individual electron. Extension is an emergent property of many subatomic particles interacting with each other.
Usually when you hear about the volume of a molecule what they are talking about is the volume implied by the "Van der Waals radius" of the particle. The Van der Waals radius is the closest that two identical particles can be (be they molecules, atoms, or subatomic particles) without the pressure breaking it down. It is measured by subjecting the substance to increasing pressures and seeing how its volume changes. As the pressure increases the volume of the substance decreases and eventually it starts to reach a minimum like the vertical line near the origin in this plot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Real_Gas_Isotherms.svg (the different lines are different temperatures, the horizontal axis is the volume and the vertical axis is the pressure) By this time the substance is usually a solid. You extrapolate that minimum, divide by the number of particles, and you get the Van der Waals volume.
As you can see you need trillions of particles interacting with each other before the concept of the volume of the molecule can arise.
Edit: there are other concepts of volume, like the nuclear scattering that's derived from the probability that an "alpha particle" (look it up) will hit the nucleus of any atom in a solid sheet of metal instead of passing through it, and the angle it is deflected at. If you take this information and assume both the nucleus and the alpha particle are like solid billiard balls, then you can deduce the size of these balls, and this is the volume that is used to say that "the nucleus is 50000 times smaller than the atom" or whatever.
Again you need a stream of alpha particles and a solid metal lattice with trillions of particles before a concept of volume can arise.
Yeah and no, doesn't really matter tbh, this is another case of everyday concepts being inadequate to describe quantum physics, and also interpretational disagreements.
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I'd turn it around and say that our everyday concept of things having volume comes from the electrostatic forces binding the object together and also those repelling other things.
When you touch an object your finger does not go through the object because the electron cloud on the outside of your finger repels the electron cloud on the outside of the object because both have the same charge.
So in a way electrons are volume, even though you can't really say what's the volume of an individual electron. Extension is an emergent property of many subatomic particles interacting with each other.
Usually when you hear about the volume of a molecule what they are talking about is the volume implied by the "Van der Waals radius" of the particle. The Van der Waals radius is the closest that two identical particles can be (be they molecules, atoms, or subatomic particles) without the pressure breaking it down. It is measured by subjecting the substance to increasing pressures and seeing how its volume changes. As the pressure increases the volume of the substance decreases and eventually it starts to reach a minimum like the vertical line near the origin in this plot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Real_Gas_Isotherms.svg (the different lines are different temperatures, the horizontal axis is the volume and the vertical axis is the pressure) By this time the substance is usually a solid. You extrapolate that minimum, divide by the number of particles, and you get the Van der Waals volume.
As you can see you need trillions of particles interacting with each other before the concept of the volume of the molecule can arise.
Edit: there are other concepts of volume, like the nuclear scattering that's derived from the probability that an "alpha particle" (look it up) will hit the nucleus of any atom in a solid sheet of metal instead of passing through it, and the angle it is deflected at. If you take this information and assume both the nucleus and the alpha particle are like solid billiard balls, then you can deduce the size of these balls, and this is the volume that is used to say that "the nucleus is 50000 times smaller than the atom" or whatever.
Again you need a stream of alpha particles and a solid metal lattice with trillions of particles before a concept of volume can arise.
they do, technically they even have infinite extensions
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Basically yeah, electron clouds technically extend infinitely as probability goes to zero
Yeah and no, doesn't really matter tbh, this is another case of everyday concepts being inadequate to describe quantum physics, and also interpretational disagreements.