Inaccurate for the reasons given. You can chop it in half and still have the same substance. If you chop a molecule in half, you’ve got a different chemical substance.
Some people say that a piece of (thermoset) plastic is essentially one giant molecule. While that is more true than it is of a piece of metal (the plastic has covalent bonds throughout) I still reckon it fails on the “chopping it in half” test.
I don’t think even cross-linked plastics could pass that test, although you could cut some of those giant molecules into pieces and have the same kind of molecule.
AtomicDog did so (by way of a wiki link) right in post #4.
Of course, electromagnetism arises from the electron.
Electrons, is there anything they can’t do?
Well, experience the strong interaction… but they’re still pretty awesome
How about Love?
To give a more serious reply than my last one, I should mention that the charge of the nucleus (which comes from the proton) is also important. A bunch of negatively charged electrons with no positive charges would just repel each other.
But because the nucleus is much more massive than the electrons, one can typically compute electron energy levels for a fixed configuration of nuclei and then separately consider the nuclear motion. This is the Born-Oppenheimer approximation
Looove! Love will keep us togethuh! Thiiiink of me babe, whenevuh!
crickets
Could someone flesh out (no p. intended) the fact that we don’t fall through our chairs–most atoms with huge amounts of nothing but charge between them?
Ditto with when you’re thrown through a pane of glass.
I believe the cite upthread on baseball bats accounts for this, but it would be nice to hear it again. I know the furniture thing is famous; don’t know who first asked it, though.
Because “charge” at the particle level is so strong it’s actually hard to imagine it. I remember a chapter in my physics textbook (Resnick & Holladay) about scientists testing collisions between various substances. They shot a particle of A at a thin sheet of particle B and they were surprised A bounced back. The mass difference was so great that they illustrated it thus: “It was as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a sheet of tissue paper and the shell ricocheted back at you.”
So, if someone hits me with a baseball bat, the atoms in the baseball bat (which stick to each other because of the covalent bond) encounter the atoms in my body and the electrons of the BatAtoms and the MichaelAtoms repel each other because they’re negatively-charged, correct?
If there is enough push behind the BatAtoms, the bat will not bounce back because of the repulsion but keep pushing against the MichaelAtoms. Since the covalent bonds between the BatAtoms are stronger than the covalent bonds between the MichaelAtoms, the covalent bonds between the MichaelAtoms will break, thus fucking Michael’s shit up. Correct so far?
If a sword of the same weight at the same velocity were used instead of a bat, what are the exact reasons (i.e.: at the atomic and molecular levels) that it would be more effective at disrupting the covalent bonds than the baseball bat?
When disrupting covalent bonds by collision, is it momentum (mass X velocity) or kinetic energy (mass X velocity X velocity) that matters?
Aside from pressure by collision, how can covalent bonds be disrupted? Would it be possible to remotely disrupt covalent bonds in an object by throwing a lot of sub-molecular particles at something?
^
I don’t know how a physicist could explain your observation at the molecular level. See, at the macroscopic level, the factors are weight, momentum, compressive strength and elasticity.