*While this isn’t any more wrong than any other attempt to render quantum mechanics by the light of our experience in the natural world, I think it may offer a somewhat misleading impression of what the atoms and photons are actually doing. If you imagine the electrons shooting back and forth fast enough to nail any passing electron and then start running numbers on exactly how fast a particle of the diameter of electron would have to go in order to cover the “area” of its shell, you realize that it would be moving at huge multiples of the speed of light, and therefore should sell itself out to the Yankees as a shortstop. This is obviously not the case, and that is because there is nothing obvious about QM.
*
The barrier the electron is going “through” isn’t a physical object; it’s an energy level that it doesn’t have enough momentum to achieve. Instead of somehow getting enough energy to hop over the “barrier”, it just…appears on the other side, stochastically-speaking, of course. The effect occurs because there’s a finite chance for the electron to “be” outside the barrier, even though it can’t get enough energy to go over it, and then when it is, it’s there, like the Cheshire Cat. Remember, as Chronos is on a mission to point out, there is no particle! There’s just that a wave is sometimes best conceptually treated as a particle because, like assuming a horse is a sphere, it makes the math easier.
Some people think that, given the right conditions, this can occur on the macro level. If you do a search on Google for “Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling” you’ll get a few scholarly sites like this one and this one (that provide almost no information), and then a bunch of free energy/anti-gravity/tinfoil hat crap like this. I don’t think any knowledgable scientist will suggest that it can be used to bypass the front door of Fort Knox or flit a spaceship across the unimaginable distances between stars, though I do recall an '80s RPG (Traveller?) that used the concept.
Some more information about QT here. A simple explaination with nice pictures.
The link below does not debunk macro quantum tunneling as impossible. Rather they do the calculation to show it is just super-improbable. Near impossible is not the same as impossible…now if we can only come up with that Infinite Improbability Drive we’ll be all set!
[sub]Anyone have a nice cup of really HOT tea handy?[/sub]
I now know why organized religion is so successful as opposed to scientific thinking. Why people kid themselves into believing all that ignorant stuff.
Because the alternative explanation is so hard to comprehend that it is impossible to understand completely.
Up until post #28, I thought I had understood everything that is happening, I had the “illuminated look on my face”, and then the stranger came along to wreck everything
Since the argument from that point is intelligible and unintelligible at the same time, much like the subject it discusses, I simply choose to believe the explanation given before #28. That the universe is made up of baseball-shrunk-to-scale particles that create the sense of touch by repulsion, and thus matter is solid at the macroscopic scale despite being mostly empty.
Even that simplified explanation is quite impossible to explain in summary to the illiterate billions the human population is mostly made up of. So, everybody simply chooses to believe there’s a dude up there that made everything using “magic” - a force that most people except a few who know the dude up there better cannot control or harness. Besides, it’s comforting to believe that there’s always somebody looking out for the good and working against the evil. Wait, I don’t think good and evil matter to quantum mechanics - because they cannot be quantized
If the atoms of my hand never make actual contact with the atoms of the desk, I’d love to know:[ul][]Is it possible to measure how close they get?[]Do they get closer if I hid the desk hard, than if I hit the desk softly?[/ul]
It’s all “empty space” and all filled by fields. However, in the case of the late Q.E.D., the fields are still around, they’re just not aligned in a systemic form that we would think of as animated and sentient.
Do you mean predict analytically, or actually measure? If the former, yes, it is possible within allowable precision to predict how close the nuclei could come to each other. Measuring the distance between the actually loci of the electrons that reside within the electron shells is not meaningful for reasons that are readily apparent only if you understand QED (the theory, not the poster).
Not unless you are hitting the desk hard enough to dislocate electrons from the valance (outer) shell. If you can turn your desk into a cloud of plasma, you should give yourself a cool name and buy a spandex jumpsuit, or else hire yourself out to ITER as they’re always on the lookout for fresh talent in the field of applied high energy physics.
Some believe, in theory (with some evidence), there can be another step here in which the star becomes a Quark Star (or Strange Star). If the gravity is sufficiently high the neutrons break down into their constituent quarks.
Such a star would be consider a single hadron…albeit a hadron several miles across.
