Kitty Oppenheimer: Can you explain quantum mechanics?
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Well, this glass, this drink, this countertop, uh, our bodies, all of that. Most of it is empty space. A group of small energy waves bundled together.
Kitty Oppenheimer: by what?
J. Robert Oppenheimer: A gravitational pull strong enough to convince us [that] Matter is solid, blocking my body from passing through yours.
— Quoted from IMDB oppenheimer
Traveling back in time to 2023, Mario Barbatti studies the interaction of light and molecules as a theoretical chemist and physicist. He is also Professor of Chemistry at the University of Aix-Marseille, France. This week I am writing ionargues Barbatti.There are no empty spaces within an atom.
” empty atom This picture is perhaps the most repeated mistake in popular science. ”
It’s unclear who created this myth, but Carl Sagan in his classic TV series universe (1980) was very important in its popularization. After wondering how small the nucleus is compared to the nucleus, Sagan concluded:[M]Most of an atom’s mass is in the nucleus. By comparison, electrons are little more than moving fluffy clouds. Atoms are primarily empty space. Matter is primarily composed of nothingness. ” I still remember how deeply these words spoke to me when I heard them as a child in the early 1980s. Today, as a professional theoretical chemist, I know that Sagan’s remarks fail to recognize some fundamental properties of matter. Atoms and molecules…
The misconceptions that affect the idea of empty atoms can be dismantled by a careful interpretation of the quantum theories that explain the physics of molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles. According to quantum theory, the building blocks of matter such as electrons, nuclei, and the molecules they form can be represented as waves or particles. Evolving them naturally without human intervention, they act like delocalized waves in a continuous cloud shape. On the other hand, when we try to observe these systems, they appear as localized particles, like bullets in the classical domain. But accepting the quantum prediction that nuclei and electrons fill space as a continuous cloud comes with a bold conceptual price. That means these particles do not vibrate, rotate, or revolve. They live in immobile microcosms where time only occasionally affects…
A molecule is a static object with no internal motion. All atomic nuclei and quantum clouds of electrons remain perfectly stationary for molecules with well-defined energies. Time is irrelevant…but time does matter when a molecule collides with another and causes a chemical reaction. Then a storm hits. Quantum stability explodes when part of the electron cloud is poured from one of her molecules into another. Clouds mix, change shape, merge and split. The nuclear cloud rearranges to fit within the new electron configuration and may even move between molecules. For fractions of a picosecond (10 to 12 seconds, or billionths of a millisecond), the storm rages and reshapes the molecular landscape until calm returns to the newly formed compounds.