You Have Never Touched Anything

If you squeezed all the empty space out of your atoms, you would shrink to a speck smaller than a grain of sand, and still weigh exactly as much as you do now. Almost all of you is nothing. So why does your hand stop when it hits a table? What are you actually feeling when you touch something? And what does it take to really delete the emptiness inside matter? 00:00 The empty-space machine 00:57 How empty is empty? 02:24 Shooting at gold 03:50 Personal space 05:58 You have never touched anything 07:22 Delete the empty space 09:03 Our opinion Sources: Nuclear density and the "human race in a sugar cube" calculation: HyperPhysics, Neutron stars and pulsars Number of atoms in the human body: Jefferson Lab, Science Education Size of the nucleus compared with the atom: Oxford VR Chemistry; Windows to the Universe Geiger & Marsden (1909). On a diffuse reflection of the α-particles. Proc. R. Soc. A. Rutherford (1911). The scattering of α and β particles by matter and the structure of the atom. Philosophical Magazine. Rutherford's "fifteen-inch shell" quote: Purdue ChemEd Electric force vs gravity between two protons: Encyclopaedia Britannica Pauli (1925), the exclusion principle; Nobel Prize in Physics 1945 Dyson & Lenard (1967). Stability of matter. J. Math. Phys.; Lieb (2002), The stability of matter and quantum electrodynamics Skedung et al. (2013). Feeling small: exploring the tactile perception limits. Scientific Reports. White dwarfs and neutron stars: HyperPhysics; University of Oregon; NASA (NGC 2440) #physics #atoms #science #animation #quantum