There's at least a 50% chance you'll get this reaction if you're having a conversation about politics and you pepper in a bunch of long-dead theorists. Being able to explain things on their merits, in plain language, is crucial.
The actual synthesis is just quantum dynamics - electrons aren't actually point particles, they are a probability distribution, the text is fake, but its funny anyways.
Yeah, it is funny, though the thing about particles shows lack of understanding.
electrons aren’t actually point particles, they are a probability distribution
This is actually kind of debatable and a matter of interpretation. But yeah I doubt you would see a real physicist academic saying electrons are point particles.
Yeah, there's a few other ways to define it that end up being equivalent (mostly) but I like this one because it hints at most counterintuitive properties.
Not really, plus the electrons aren't acually zero-dimensional points and the post is fake, but its still very funny lol
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.
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.
Lmao I've seen this before a million years ago, thanks for reminding me. It's almost as good as the one where some dude feels insecure about his girlfriend's relationship with Zizek based on a poster she had.
Yeah I found it. Here is the original (deleted) post: https://www.reddit.com/r/relationships/comments/3gxa9t/me_24_m_with_my_girlfriend_22_f_of_8_months_she/
What it used to say:
My girlfriend (22f) and I (24m) are having a disagreement about a picture.
I met my girlfriend, Sam, 8 months ago at a house party and we’ve been pretty much inseparable since then. She’s witty, intelligent, funny and gorgeous and we are almost the perfect couple.
The only issue I’ve been having recently is a framed picture she keeps over her bed. It’s of an older gentleman lying in bed with a scowl on his face. She lives with roommates and I live alone so we spend most of our time together at my place and I’ve only been in her room a couple times so I’ve never really brought it up.
For a while I just figured it was a relative of some sort (Sam is African American but this is a picture of a white guy) until recently I met her extended family at a birthday party for her cousin. On the way back I asked who the picture in her bedroom is of, since it’s not anyone I met at the party. She started laughing at me and explained that the picture is of some apparently famous philosopher guy named Slavoj Zijek (I don’t know if that’s spelled right) and she doesn’t know him. WTF. We started arguing about it, I said it was weird to keep pictures of random people in your bedroom and she said it was somehow ‘pomo’, I don’t know what that means, her major is philosophy and mine is computer science.
TL;DR: girlfriend keeps picture of a philosopher on her bedroom wall. I’m weirded out and kind of jealous that this guy is apparently so important to her that she has a random picture of him above her bed. Am I overreacting though?
