If you continue to halve an object down, can it end? I mean it would be kinda impossible no? To jump from last half to nothing; it would have to continue halving no? How do you arrive at nothing by halving?
v yours
This is an excellent question that has been keeping philosophers and physicists busy for centuries. What you’re actually asking is whether stuff is quantized - if there’s some small unit of stuff that is indivisible. The ancient Greeks reasoned that there must be such a thing, describing it as atomos (meaning uncuttable) - from which we get the term atom. But atoms aren’t uncuttable.
However, I believe it is currently considered true that some of the things from which atoms are composed may be truly uncuttable - trouble is that they’re so small and weirdly-defined that they don’t quite fit the description of ‘stuff’ anymore, at least not in the intuitive human sense of tangible physical matter. They’re (generally/collectively) called quanta, which means ‘an amount of stuff’.
Once you split atoms, you cease to have ‘stuff’: Electrons aren’t ‘stuff’ because they can (have to) jump gaps without existing in the space between points A and B (the ‘quantum leap’), protons and neutrons aren’t ‘stuff’ because they exhibit wave-particle duality, and everything else you may have heard of (photons, quarks, gluons, etc.) is even less ‘stuff’-like.
Of course, just because it isn’t ‘stuff’ doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It would be impossible to explain a good deal of the world we observe every day (especially these days) if we insisted everything must be ‘stuff’ all the way down.
Well, you have something but it is no longer the same stuff you started with. If you start with a pound of gold and keep halving it until you’re down to one atom, you still have a “piece” of gold.
The question is one that is often addressed in high school chem and physics.
At what point does it cease to be “stuff” and once that happens, what do we call it?
It depends how broadly you define ‘stuff’, I guess. Chop it fine enough and what you have is energy. It isn’t unhelpful to think of matter as being made of little knots of energy.
I think he meant “slicing” the atom itself. Then it isn’t gold anymore. In fact, it isn’t anything that can be conveyed by normal language or everday understanding. It is the realm of subatomic particles and quantum physics. Electrons and other subatomic particles aren’t even true particles at all. They aren’t like tiny planets orbitting around the sun. Instead, they are a probability cloud of existence around the nucleus. As best I undertstand, they don’t even exist at all according to our normal understanding. They float in and out of existence according to a fuzzy probability distribution.
I thought it was “Turtles” all the way down, young man!
This explanation is accurate, if perhaps a little muddled. Permit me to clarify.
The electron is a type of elementry fermion, in the class of leptons; that is to say, it has a half-integer “spin”, does not experience strong nuclear interaction and is incapable of being further deconstructed. It does, as Derleth states, display a locus of action (the place where it appears to be) that is statistical rather than deterministic, i.e. it could be anywhere in the universe, and is just most likely to be somewhere near it’s nominal position. Protons and neutrons, on the other hand, are composite particles made of the other class of fermion, the quark. The quark also displays statistical behavior, but because the proton and neutron are made of a bunch of quarks their behavior is an average (sort of) of their component parts, and hence their loci are closer to being deterministic. By the time you start putting multiple atoms together, the behavior of the whole is sufficiently constrained that its “fuzzyness” from quantum behavior is overwhelmed by relative size of it, such that when you put your keys down on the coffee table, you can be assured that they won’t zap halfway across the room on their own, subject to the vagaries of household felines, who are themselves an entirely unique category of quantum phenomena, but not one germane to this discussion.
So, protons and neutrons can, at least in theory, be divided into smaller particles. (As a practical matter, the conditions under which quarks exist unbound–in physics speak, deconfined–are not found in anything like normal conditions, only occuring in a quark-gluon plasma (sometimes called a quagma) under pressure and temperature extremes that can only be replicated in the most powerful particle accelerators for picosecond durations.) Quarks and electrons, along with the gauge bosons (fundamental particles with an integer spin) are, per our current Standard Model theory of particle interactions, cannot be further divided. Or as Raymond Hall of Fermilab said: “Stuff is made of particles. Therefore, particles can not be made of stuff.”
This begs the question of what an elementry particle really is. If it’s not “stuff” like a miniature baseball, then what is it? Describing it as a cloud of probability (like describing Paris Hilton as a fog of media celebrity) lacks any physical realization even if it does astutely describe its interation. And explaining it as “sometimes a particle, other times a wave” is clearly just errant waffling with no real comprehension of the nature of the beast. So just what the heck is it? The best way to describe it is a twist or distortion in the underlying plenum, a knot in a giant mat of energy (albeit one in three or more dimensions) that serves as a basis for, well, everything. And trying to divide it, or poke it out of existance, is like trying to push down lumps in a mattress; as soon as you push one down, another one pops up. The fundamental particles, by dint of their configuration, can only interact in certain ways and thus mediate the interactions between larger composite particles. (Think of a puzzle with interlocking pieces that can fit together in multiple ways.) So, in that sense, the fundamental particles are indivisible, but composite fermions and bosons are not.
Even if you could postulate some kind of hypothetical particle that could be infinitely divided, you’re still going to have an issue with seeing it beyond a certain point in division. At lengths less than a Planck length, l[sub]p[/sub]~1.62*10[sup]-35[/sup] m, you’re no longer able to even “see” (interact with via electromagnetic force) the particle; in effect, it disappears from the universe. You would have to divide a 1cm block in half about 330 times before it would be smaller (in all spatial dimensions) than a Planck length. Good luck with that.
Stranger
Q: What did the pirate say to the captive atom?
A: Aaarrr, walk the Planck!
:: d+r ::