Naked Science Forum

Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: decepticon on 23/02/2009 21:00:35

Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: decepticon on 23/02/2009 21:00:35
assuming that atoms are circular like marbles,and are tightly packed together to form a solid
what is filling the spaces between each 'marble'?
i think im right in saying that the electron is negatively charged and so repells the next atom, and that any two atoms are never actually touching? if so then there must be quite alot (relatively) of voids in a solid?
it cant be air or oxygen atoms as they would be too large so it must be a void?
if it is a void then that would mean a vacuum and then an additional force of attraction in a solid?
can someone confirm or put me right please
thanks
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: Vern on 23/02/2009 21:31:52
I came across this (http://www.teachersdomain.org/resource/phy03.sci.phys.matter.atoms/) that seems to explain it pretty well.

It seems the thinking now is that the electrons associated with atoms form a cloud around the nucleus that may be a 100,000 times the size of the diameter of the nucleus.


Quote from: the link
Although atoms are too small to be seen, physicists, through experimentation and indirect observation have developed a good understanding of their structure. Unlike some early models of the atom, the current atomic model is loosely constructed. Surrounding a very small and dense nucleus of protons and neutrons is a "cloud" of electrons with orbits as large as 100,000 times the diameter of the atom's nucleus.
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: decepticon on 23/02/2009 21:48:20
thanks for the reply but i already have an understanding of the atoms structure and that it contains alot of emptiness. your link unfortunately does not answer my question.
i wish to know what is happening to the atoms in a solid
thanks again
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: yor_on on 24/02/2009 01:30:31
Ah, how do you think writing "if it is a void then that would mean a vacuum and then an additional force of attraction in a solid?"?
How do you equal vacuum with a 'force of attraction'?
And as Vern's link pointed out, there are a lot of vacuum (99.999~whatever:) percent inherent in any atom?
So that 'force' you are seeing, what do you believe that to be??
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: Hei-Tai on 24/02/2009 11:16:42
 [:)]

Fine question,,one thought for me.

 [ Invalid Attachment ]

Atom theory give us some view,,my thouhgt is that there is smaller matter-particles,,
atom--part electron,,smaller example photon,,,and much smaller is basic-matter and this basic-matter exist all.


 [:)]
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: decepticon on 24/02/2009 16:49:41
forget the structure of atoms and forget what is inside the atom as my question does not need this added confusion.
the atom in my example is a marble, if you neatly pack lots of marbles in to a large mass then this is my 'solid'
however the marbles do not neatly pack together as they are spheres, so there are voids between the marbles.
in an atomic scale i wish to clarify what these voids are composed of. as these 'voids' will be extremely small then i imagine that they are completely empty of anything thus a space filled with nothing must be a vacuum?
if a vacuum exists between two bodies in a closed environment then the bodies are drawn together and thus surely a force is created/acting on the bodies/solid as a whole
hopefully someone understands what i am trying to explain
cheers
neil
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: yor_on on 24/02/2009 17:21:29
They are not 'solids' in that meaning Neil.
A atom consists of a electroncloud in where we can't really pinpoint single electrons, inside that 'cloud' orbiting you will find what is called the nucleus. That consists of protons and neutrons, those in its turn consists of quarks that are hold together by gluons. http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC/primer.htm

The 'forces' holding atoms together (a force is a push or pull on an object) are four.

"The electromagnetic force keeps electrons attached to their atom.
The strong force holds the protons and neutrons together in the nucleus.
The weak force governs how atoms decay when they have excess protons or neutrons.
The fourth fundamental force, gravity, only becomes apparent with objects much larger than subatomic particles."

Those forces have nothing to do with what you are thinking of, if I get you right.
You are thinking of a macroscopic effect like vacuum packing right?
When plastic is placed over a object and all air is sucked out.

The 'force' working on that tight wrapped plastic is the air outside it.
The air pressure we live under on earth is a 'force' of its own. "A column of air 1 square inch in cross section, measured from sea level to the top of the atmosphere, would weigh approximately 14.7 lbf. A column of air would weigh about 100 kilonewtons (equivalent to a mass of 10.2 tonnes at the surface). " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_pressure

Molecules of air needs a lot of atoms to create them, single molecules can be made from two atoms up to hundreds of millions of atoms.

"Knowing the size of a small molecule doesn't immediately tell you how many molecules or atoms exist in a given volume of a the corresponding substance. One needs a way to account for the space between the atoms or molecules.
In 1873, James Clerk Maxwell gave a first estimate of Loschmidt's Number [1], the number of molecules in 1 cm3 of air.

His experiments used some of Loschmidt's results. He estimated 1.9 x 1019 (nineteen million million million) molecules (in 1 cm3 of air).

Today one prefers Avogadro's Number, NA, the number of molecules in 22.4 liters of a gas, and Maxwell's estimate corresponds to an NA value of 4.25 x 1023. NA is now known to great accuracy and is approximatively 6.02 x 1023. "

And if you think of divers deep diving you know that the pressure of water don't allow us to go down with normal equipment much more than around ninety meters, before the pressure gets to high for the normal gas blends we use.

----

I can't swear to this but here are some other numbers for atoms.

Number of atoms in one cm3 of air we breathe: = 10^19 atoms (ten elevated to nineteen atoms per cubic centimeter)
Number of atoms in one cm3 of interstellar gas of the Galaxy: = 1 atom
Number of atoms in one m3 of intergalactic space: = 1 atom
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: lightarrow on 24/02/2009 17:35:21
[ Invalid Attachment ]

Nice picture, it is "Artistical physics"?  [:)]
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: swansont on 24/02/2009 17:38:31
the atom in my example is a marble


Atoms are not marbles.  The space between atoms in any solid lattice is the same as the space between atoms in a gas. 
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: Hei-Tai on 24/02/2009 17:50:41
Nice picture, it is "Artistical physics"?  [:)]
[/quote]

 [:)]

Hmm,yes. [:I]

I load again the image,,something happen that accurace

 [ Invalid Attachment ]

Image means that there is no any empty place between matter-particles,,so smalles particles is much smaller than atom-theory give us explanation,,my thought.

Hmm,seems that same accurace-pixell problem is still,,ok,,idea come out.

 [:)]
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: decepticon on 24/02/2009 19:08:18
thanks for your replies yor_on but you seem insistant on describing and advising me on the structures of atoms themselves.
lets take a lump of titanium for example, which is a solid.
lets assume that i have 100 cubic mm of it,
now i know that atoms are mainly empty but they do have clearly definable boundarys which the next atom does not merge into, and these boundarys are spheres.
so the total volume of atoms in my lump is approx 90 cubic mm
what is the 10 cubic mm of missing volume filled with?
thanks
neil
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: Bored chemist on 24/02/2009 19:48:03
Picturing atoms as marbles doesn't help here.
Imagine that they are more like balls of cotton wool.
Now, if you pack those into a box they fill the whole space- though the space near the middles of the balls is packed more densely with cotton, and the spaces between them have less "fluff".
Of course, with balls of cotton wool the gaps between the fibres are generally full of air. But if the box were strong enough you could get a vacuum pump and remove that air. The cotton would still fill all the space (in a way) but it would fill some bits of the space more densely than other bits.
In atoms there is just "nothing" between the electrons and the electrons are in diffuse clouds.
They have fairly clearly defined middles, but the "edges" and the diameters are not very well defined at all.
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: Madidus_Scientia on 24/02/2009 19:51:33
I think you're thinking that a vacuum sucks, but it doesn't. If you suck the air out of a bottle and it collapses it's not because you've 'sucked it in' but because you have lowered the pressure inside so it equalizes with the higher pressure outside. A bottle with no air in it in space would not collapse as it is not under pressure. In the same way, the vacuum in between and inside atoms will not draw them together.
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: decepticon on 24/02/2009 21:37:35
thankyou bored chemist and madidus scientia for your replies and i have a better understanding now.
i was thinking that atoms were spherical and electron orbits defined the spherical shape.
cheers
neil
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: Vern on 24/02/2009 21:56:51
thankyou bored chemist and madidus scientia for your replies and i have a better understanding now.
i was thinking that atoms were spherical and electron orbits defined the spherical shape.
cheers
neil
I guess you were looking for something that is not part of the atom to be inside the atom. The only thing there that is not part of the atom would be the empty space and various fields of force that yor_on described that hold the atom together.
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: Geerbuckzzz on 25/03/2009 12:28:28
Can we say that there really is an empty space on an atomic scale? Some say that there is no really a perfect vaccum in the universe we're in but can you say that on atomic scale there is a perfect vacuum, devoid of everything or it is the force that fills the gaps?
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: Vern on 25/03/2009 12:47:46
I think that the best we can do is to say that empty space is, by definition, empty of particles. We don't usually think of the amount of electromagnetic radiation that may be there. So, empty space may contain any amount of electromagnetic radiation. And we are coming to realise more and more that this radiation is real stuff.
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: Bored chemist on 25/03/2009 20:06:58
Once you look at quantum mechanics all bets are off. The "edge" or "surface" of an atom isn't defined, it's just that the probabliity of finding an atom far from where you expect it is small. However, since, at any finite distance, that probality is not zero you can say that there's a small chance that an electron that's currently associated with, for example, the left-hand-most proton of my left ear is, in fact, also in your vacuum chamber.
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: dlorde on 25/03/2009 22:47:32
According to quantum mechanics, the vacuum that lies between particles & atoms is actually quite dynamic, on a very much smaller scale... The Uncertainty Principle suggests that on the smallest scales possible (around the Planck Length), there is turbulence where temporary fluctuations in background energy come and go - energy is 'borrowed' from the background for very short periods, like little random ripples - peaks and troughs of positive and negative energy, all summing to zero. When enough energy is borrowed, these ripples can be thought of as manifesting as positive and negative energy 'virtual' particles, which immediately annihilate each other and return the status-quo (that's why they are termed 'virtual'). On average, the laws of thermodynamics are not broken, as overall, energy is conserved. This seething mass of uncertainty and particles popping into and out of existence is often - poetically - called Quantum or Spacetime Foam.

When Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose were developing the physics of black holes, Hawking realised that at the event horizon, the point where the gravitation field becomes so strong that nothing can escape, you might get these virtual particles produced, where one particle happens to be on the inside and the other on the outside of the event horizon. If the positive energy particle is outside, it can (in principle) escape, becoming a 'real' particle, whereas the negative particle is doomed plunge into the black hole - reducing its energy. So he suggested that black holes can and do actually radiate particles and 'evaporate' in this way. Further calculation showed that for conventional black holes caused by collapse of large stars, this evaporation would be incredibly slow, but the smaller the black hole, the faster this would happen, and tiny black holes would radiate so fast they would effectively explode in a blast of particles - so there are unlikely to be any really tiny black holes lurking around - if the Large Hadron Collider could create one, it would be so small that it would pop instantly in a tiny spray of particles, like a sub-atomic firework - assuming Hawking is right.
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: Fluid_thinker on 26/03/2009 16:33:00
As a simpleton compared to yourselves. Surely if we believe you can compress massive sun's into Neutron Stars, then we are squashing the particles closer and closer together. This can only be done on the premise that there is 'SPACE', VOID or whatever you call it to take up the compression. Especially of you go down to quark stars.
Title: what is between atoms?
Post by: dlorde on 26/03/2009 22:13:16
As a simpleton compared to yourselves. Surely if we believe you can compress massive sun's into Neutron Stars, then we are squashing the particles closer and closer together. This can only be done on the premise that there is 'SPACE', VOID or whatever you call it to take up the compression. Especially of you go down to quark stars.
Yes - there are vast 'spaces' between and within atoms and between particles, relative to their size. The turbulence of 'Quantum Foam' occurs at much smaller scales - around the Planck length, which is about 10-20 times the size of a proton. A hydrogen atom is about a ten millionth of a millimeter in diameter, and its proton is about hundred thousand times smaller, and the electron 'orbiting' it is about thousand times smaller still. There's plenty of space down there [;)]

Here's an interesting link down to about a quark size: Powers of 10 (http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/)