At the quantum level, if there is so much space in any typical atom, why can’t a person walk through walls?
There’s a lot of space, yes, but there’s also a lot of force (relatively,) holding things together. The forces holding the atoms and molecules of the wall together don’t want to let your atoms and molecules get in the way.
Plus, let me put a baseball at the end of a rope and swing it around my head really fast while you try to walk through it. Sure, the baseball only occupies a very small percentage of the area it covers at any one given time, but I bet it still hurts like hell when it smacks you in the face.
I’ve always thought about the same enigma: If my hands are both made of the same things, and knowing what seems to be true about atoms, why can’t they pass through each other? Then I realize that the force behind such problems can be explained with the following analogy. Imagine two tennis balls filled with bees flying around in circular patterns all the way around the inside perimeters, now take away the tennis balls, and the rapid movement of the bees prevents the two “spheres” from squashing into each other.
But you mentioned the quantum world, which just so happens to allow for such instances. Theories have been postulated stating if you were to “walk into”, or at least try to pass through a wall forever it could be possible that all the atoms in your body and in the wall would eventually line up in such a way that you could pass through it. I am not quite sure if this has to do more with the empty space, or the probability factors of where and how fast and frequent the electrons paths occur.
- Which actually could be just about the same difference.
Because the electrostatic repulsion between your electrons and the floor’s electrons is stronger than your muscles or gravity. At least gravity here on earth.
Ok - so in a nutshell it’s the force of the electrons moving rapidly around the nucleus that prevent the different atoms from passing through. Can the electrons move at different speeds depending on what kind of atom they are in? If the electrons move more slowly, is the substance more permeable?
i see this question on par with “why can’t i walk through a chain link fence?”
as for “walking into a wall forever” … no. you could never walk through a wall even if given an infinite time limit. i’m assuming that “theory” refers to quantum tunneling, which is a subatomic phenomenon dealing with wave motions and the fact that position and momentum cannot be determined exactly. people are not subatomic.
*edit
“if the electrons are moving more slowly…”
electrons don’t “move” persay. they exist in a probability field - orbitals. electron clouds intuitively are where electrons could be. practically, it’s where they are. in a very zen answer, the electrons are everywhere at once. again this harkens back to the fact that for subatomic particles you can’t know both momentum and position. so, for electrons orbiting an atom there’s no way to stick your proverbial finger through because the electron is always “there”. sounds BS-y but that’s the nature of quantum.
I don’t know if this kosher, mixing classical physics, the Bohr model places fairly solid electrons in fixed patterns around a nucleus, and quantum physics, which can only predict fuzzy clouds of probable locations for the electron, you can’t even tell where it is, and how fast it’s going at once. It pops in and out of what seems to here and who knows where. This is what makes it theoretically even remotely possible that you could witness atoms passing though each other, granted you could be abound for infinity. Yes and gravity does do something to hold it all together. And when it comes down to it, you could even throw in some chemistry and and try to have various atoms crash and see what happens. Yes, electrons move at different speeds according to how many there are, how much energy they are using, remember that hot things move a lot faster, and other anomalies like whether they are ionic, contain neutrons and blah blah blah.
It has nothing to do with how quickly they are moving around the nucleus. It’s the fact that they are electrically negative and your electrons are electrically negative. The electrostatic repulsion between them keep you from moving through those solids.
I think this is incorrect.
True we are not subatomic but we are made from subatomic stuff. However, given an infinite amount of time I believe there is a non-zero chance you could walk through a wall. Essentially, all your sub atomic particles would just happen to tunnel through the wall at the same time.
Granted this is a super-duper unlikely thing to have happen and you would have to try for a fantastically long time to see it happen but then infinity is a long time. As long as the chances are non-zero it will occur, eventually, in an infinite timespan.
To the OP to give you an idea of how much empty space there is in matter consider our sun. It is about 1,392,000 kilometers in diameter. If you squished that down into a Neutron Star (where all the electrons are forced into the nucleus of their atoms thus removing the majority of the empty space in an atom) our sun would be around 18 kilometers in diameter (give or take a kilometer or two). Manhattan island in New York is over 21 kilometers long for comparison. A teaspoon full of Neutron Star material would weigh as much as Mt. Everest here on Earth (or looked at in reverse like cramming Mt. Everest into a teaspoon).
So yeah…lots of empty space in matter. Most of it is really.
The space between atoms is not empty: It’s chock full of fields (of most interest to us, electromagnetic fields). This may seem like nitpickery, but really, the protons, neutrons, and electrons are also just made out of fields, just different kinds of fields.
Wait - the electrons, protons and neutrons are just fields too??? I thought they were made of quarks (and you’ll probably say that quarks are just fields).
Where’s the MASS? (Am I asking a silly question here - I haven’t had a physics class before. - Thanks for everyone’s patience.)
Corn, soybeans, winter wheat… I’m told they even grow fields of dental floss up Montana way.
We are not subatomic particles. we might be composed of them but we don’t share their properties. we are not wavelike, we don’t oscillate uniformly, we don’t carry a uniform electric potential, yadda yadda yadda. tunneling pertains to the crossing of classically undefined areas and is restricted to very tiny spaces and restricted by kinetic energy. the tunneling distances are TINY and not even subatomic particles can from one side of a wall to another much less a full human being.
to make such a leap of logic that if subatomic tunneling exists, then teleportation must exist is like saying a baby took its first step so that if that baby given an infinite number of lifetimes to take that first step, at some point will be able to run the boston marathon.
Here is a clear, concise, historically contextual volume on Quantum Physics. http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Physics-Quantum-Theory-Mechanics.htm
Thanks everyone!
I asked the same question here.
That question is one of the main reasons why the Large Hadron Collider was built.
In the fields, of course. You don’t even need quantum mechanics for that one-- You’ll find the mass stored in an electric or magnetic field in any introductory E&M course.