Nostr Web Client

explained to my son that we're mostly made of empty space and nothing ever really *touches* and it melted his brain. got gpt to make a cool analogy:

"In ordinary matter (like the stuff around you), the distance between the centers of atoms is on the order of 0.1 to 0.3 nanometers (that’s a tenth of a billionth of a meter). For perspective: A human hair is about 80,000–100,000 nanometers thick. So the gap between atoms is about a million times smaller than the thickness of your hair.

If we blow up an atom to a humanly relatable size: Imagine each atom as a soccer ball about the size of your head. The "neighboring" atoms would be another soccer ball about 1–3 meters away (roughly across a small room). But here’s the kicker: the actual nucleus (the dense center of the atom) is tiny compared to that. If your atom-soccer ball represented just the electron cloud, the nucleus would be a grain of sand in the middle — and almost all of that room is empty space."

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Discussion

Sinautoshi 3mo ago

Part 2:

Okay, so remember how we said atoms are like head-sized soccer balls floating across the room from each other, with only a tiny grain of sand in the middle? And that almost everything is just empty space? Here’s the next brain-bender: those soccer balls aren’t even really there in a definite spot until you look.

Before you look, each ‘soccer ball atom’ is more like a magical balloon that fills the whole room at once. It’s not one ball in one place — it’s a wave of possibilities, spread out. The atom is smeared everywhere, like a ghost of itself.

Now comes the wavefunction collapse: the moment you open the door and shine a flashlight into the room, that ghost-ball snaps into one actual soccer ball in one specific spot. Boom — the balloon pops and leaves behind just one ball where before there were endless maybes.

It’s like rolling a million-sided die: before you roll, all outcomes exist as possibilities floating in the air; the instant you actually roll, the universe ‘chooses’ one side — the collapse.

So: not only are you made of mostly empty space, you’re also made of tiny ghost-balloons that only decide where to be when the universe checks.”

Jameson Lopp 3mo ago

I've met plenty of people who definitely have empty space in their skull.

Weatherall 3mo ago

☝️

solution: increase arbitrary data storage limit.

Satosha 3mo ago

Empty space is a wrong metaphor.. all that space is actually a probability cloud .. packed with complex numbers and their complex conjugates .. please don't misguide next generation 😀🙏

jb55 3mo ago

but there isn't anything physical about the probability cloud, so I think empty space is still the right way to think about it

frphank 3mo ago

It's filled with an electric field that produces forces, attractive and repulsive, the way a spring or pillow produces forces when you push or pull on it. So that's very well physical.

Satosha 3mo ago

Emptiness is not a property of space , it is of our sensory machine .. I am sure Bats see a lot of stuff in that empty space .. btw , we can't even begin to understand 90 percent of the real stuff that is out there .. dark matter and dark energy .. so our limitations are not only of the so called EMPTY .. it is also about absolutely FULL that we can't perceive ..

lkraider 3mo ago

Yeah, that’s all bullshit

lkraider 3mo ago

I mean, you can deconstruct anything at an arbitrary level. Eg: Planets? They are basically a rounding error in terms of matter if you look at the galactic scale. Helpful information for you to base your life decisions? Not really.

lkraider 3mo ago

Nostr vs twitter? What does it matter, It’s all 1s and 0s in the end, right?

jb55 3mo ago

nope