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As far as I know, most of an atom is vacuum. Therefore, in theory, would it be possible for me to throw a tiny stone through my window without breaking it because no matter actually collides? Any object whose size is greater than an atom cannot pass trough another similar body, because the single atoms are bonded (usally in a crystal) and form a ...

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I will elaborate on @RedAct 's answer, to eliminate the coherence problem. Let the stone be a crystal. A crystal can be described quantum mechanically with a state function and there is no coherence problem as the positions of the atoms are defined quantum mechanically. Let the glass be of crystal too, again described by a single coherent wave function. ...

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I'm fairly sure that you could not throw a stone through glass without breaking it, but were you to have an incredibly accurate neutron gun, or something that shoots similar uncharged particles, you could aim between the atoms. In that case, you could have an uncharged particle pass through a window. On the topic of particles not hitting stuff, check out ...

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When the stone gets really close to the window the electric field of the electrons in the stone's atoms will push against the electrons in the glass's atoms. That force will break the window, and there are no gaps in the field for it to slip through. I am oversimplifying some. I am ignoring quantum effects such as the Pauli exclusion principle, but unless ...

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I guess in some limited sense it is possible, if the material of the window can "self-heal". For example, you can push objects through a bubble without destroying it (http://www.hometrainingtools.com/a/bubbles-and-surface-tension-science-projects - at the end of the article; the object should be wet). On a different note, slow self-healing is possible in ...

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Yes if you open it :-) Joking aside... The reason why solids interact when contacted is the Pauli exclusion principle. It says that two electrons cannot fill the same place if they are in the same state. That means their energy levels are same, or more technically, their wave functions are not orthogonal. To make wave functions of the stone's electrons ...

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The reason for a collision is not because the nucleus of the atoms in both the stone and the glass 'collide', it is because the 'empty space' is actually a manifestation of the coulomb force (because of the opposite charge of both the electron and proton). It is this force that you would need to overcome in order to throw a stone through a window without ...

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At least according to non-relativistic quantum mechanics, it's theoretically possible for the stone to pass through the glass without breaking it via quantum tunneling. However, the probability of that actually happening with a normal-sized pebble and sheet of glass is of course so extremely small that it's utterly negligible.

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I think no, for the glass needs to have be thin also so that the proton passes, for there are many sheets of atoms and eventually the proton would collide in on3 of them. Glass is amorphous so you can't have regular geometry sheets through which it might pass

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In relativistic heavy-ion collisions, you're usually interested in reactions with much higher energy than the kilo-eV scale of a few dozen bound electrons. A typical RHI collision will have something like 10,000 particles in the final state, so a few dozen bound electrons in the initial state won't make much difference either. What does make a difference is ...

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Not only can it be done, it is being done at several facilities. See e.g. http://alicematters.web.cern.ch/?q=lhc-heavy-ion-program-begins. LHC trumps RHIC's energy by orders of magnitude. It can accelerate heavy ions to 2.76 TeV per nucleon pair, compared with RHIC’s 200 GeV. Since a nucleon has a rest mass of approx. 1GeV, these nuclei are highly ...

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The (average) mass of the Calcium ion $\text{Ca}^+$ is around $m_{ca} = 40 amu = 40 \times 1.661 \times 10^{−24} g = 66.44 \times 10^{−24} g$. That means that to accelerate (from rest) an ion of Calcium to a speed of $\frac{3}{4}c$ the energy needed would be: $$\Delta E_{ca} = (\frac{1}{\sqrt{1-(\frac{3}{4})^2}}-1)m_{ca}c^2 = 0.512m_{ca}c^2$$ which is ...

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(Skip to the bottom for a list of classical and quantum-mechanical effects of gravitation that have been observed in subatomic particles; my attempt to explain quantitatively what it would take to measure atom-atom gravity got longer than I'd intended, and I haven't had time to shorten it yet.) Let's suppose you want to measure the gravitational attraction ...

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Measure the gravitational attraction between two atoms? Heavens no. That's such a tiny, tiny attraction. The atoms will be attracted to themselves gravitationally, but only minutely. They'll be attracted gravitationally much more strongly to the Earth, to the lab setup and measuring equipment, to the buildings around the measuring equipment, and even to the ...

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Groups in Seattle, Colorado, and perhaps others managed to measure and verify Newton's inverse-square law at submillimeter distances comparable to 0.1 millimeters, see e.g. Sub-millimeter tests of the gravitational inverse-square law: A search for "large" extra dimensions Motivated by higher-dimensional theories that predict new effects, we ...

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Your questions reminds me of the movie "a serious men" by the Coen brothers (you should watch it regardless of the main character being a college physics professor). As some of the comments said, it is an oversimplification or a much more complex phenomenon. The only way to get some idea of what is happening is to understand the equations of quantum ...

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(add my comment as an answer) It all depends on the time-energy uncertainty relation $$(\Delta t) (\Delta E) \ge ℏ/2$$ (see for example here and here). Classicaly a particle can access only system (energy) states which are compatible with its (current) energy. Actually this is still true in quantum mechanics, the difference is the time-energy ...

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Electron's quantum jump is the same thing as an atomic electron transition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_electron_transition At the beginning, the electron has one energy and sits at some level which may be represented by some "typical distance" from the nucleus. At the end, it has another value of the energy, so a different "typical distance ...

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The mass of a neutral helium atom is 4.002 602 amu. That mass includes two electrons, each with mass 0.000 5485 amu = 0.511 MeV/$c^2$. You can ionize helium with ultraviolet light, so the electron binding energy is a few eV. We can neglect the electron binding energy compared to the electron mass. So the mass of an alpha particle is closer to 4.001 505 ...

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