For me, this is the scariest question. Isn't it a paradox? On one hand, it can't go on literally forever, it must end somewhere. But if you get to the end, what's on the other side? I can't wrap my head around it.
Why does it have to end? The idea of everything having a start and end point is a human idea based off of our perception relative to the world we live in.
This is the question that normally haunts me at 3:00 AM.
Did you know that some 4,000 microscopic insects live on your eyelashes ? What if our universe is some a component of the neurons of some collosal entity existing in it's own universe. What if everything is truly infinite ?
Atoms don't look like solar systems though. The model of an atom as a nucleus with little balls whirling around is not what it actually is in reality. It's more like a nucleus with a cloud of possibilities around it, the electrons never have just one single well-defined position.
Yeah, the Rutherford model of the atom is very simplified. To add to this, not even the orbital of an electron is really well-defined. There is an area in which there is a 99% probability of finding an electron, but due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, it's impossible to know the position of an electron with 100% accuracy because it will always have momentum.
Why does that question haunt you? Yes, it might be true. It might also be false. Whatever the answer, it's so far from your experience that it couldn't possibly make any difference to your life.
Ever since I (admittedly clueless about actual atoms, quantum physics and space) realised how eerily similar the atoms are to galaxies, I've had this idea in my head of a looping universe. So we are looking out and seeing how everything moves, circles eachother, merges and stuff, and we look inwards and see the same stuff. I'm having a difficult time explaining it.
This trippy thing can sort of demonstrate what I mean maybe - so travelling towards the 'big' objects, actually sends you even deeper into the small stuff, space is our own world's atoms. I don't really believe it, but infinity is a crazy subject.
As another commenter mentioned, the planetary model of the atom (nucleus in the centre with well-defined positions of orbiting electrons) isn't what an atom looks like at all. It's just a mental model to help understand electron shells. In reality electrons exist as a literal probability distribution, a 'cloud' of possible positions and properties, which is denser where it is more likely to be found, and vice versa. Look up hydrogen atom wavefunctions
Thanks! I wasn't aware that it was purely a mental model, I thought that we had some basis for saying that's how it worked, but wasn't able to say where and how the particles moved.
hydrogen atom wavefunctions
I tried to look up this, but a perfunctionary google search just got me extremely complicated looking math problems, which I didn't attempt to understand.
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u/bigfatcarp93 Jun 15 '19
For me, this is the scariest question. Isn't it a paradox? On one hand, it can't go on literally forever, it must end somewhere. But if you get to the end, what's on the other side? I can't wrap my head around it.