# Tag Info

2

Chemistry. The things we call "atoms" are chemical objects, different of the atoms of the ancients (closer to "elementary particles"). The existence of chemical atoms implies integer proportions in chemical reactions. I'd vote for electrolysis of water. The volume of $H_2$ and $O_2$ increases in integer proportion 2:1.

0

As stated, helium is inert, so it will not form compounds with other elements. In addition, once it is freely released into the atmosphere, it will quickly rise to very high altitudes, and I assume that it would be stripped away by the solar wind. Despite this, I don't anticipate running out of helium in the near future. Helium is a small constituent of ...

1

I'm no expert in this specific area, but there goes my answer: Helium has neutral net charge and a spherically symmetrical electron distribution. It is in the "noble gases" family in the periodic table, therefore it interact very weakly with other atoms, and it does not bond easily. Due to its charge neutrality, I would guess that Helium suffers almost no ...

4

For a 6 year old, you might want to focus on thickness instead of length, as the numbers get too big with length. A ream of paper (500 sheets) is a bit over an inch thick, say $3.5 \, \text{cm}$, so one sheet is $3.5/50 \, \text{mm}$, or $.07 \, \text{mm}$, which is $7 \times 10^{-5} \text{m}$. An atom has diameter $0.1 \, \text{nm}$ to $0.5 \, \text{nm}$ ...

5

A typical atom is roughly a few times $10^{-10} \text{m}$ wide. A piece of paper is say $(1/4) \text{m}$ wide. Therefore the ratio of the width of an atom to the width of a piece of paper is around $10^9$. A piece of paper is roughly the same width as a human, so $10^9$ is also a rough guess for the ratio of the width of a human to the width of an atom. The ...

2

Atoms do in fact have a sort of wave behavior you might say. Everything with mass does, even you! When the mass is small enough, like that of an electron or an atom, this behavior becomes more important to take into consideration. For example, when we go to look for an atom by shining light of a small wavelength on it, we can only say with a certain ...

2

This is just a short expansion of Ernies comment (answer really) above, same reference, and the only thing I want to add is the size of the molecules, not just atoms but 58- and 114-atom molecules, made of links of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen. $\mathrm{C}_{60}$ Fullerene Double Slit experiment and Neutron Interference Pattern both provide details of ...

0

This is because usually a electron can ONLY stay in certain energy states in a given atom, this is because of the quantum mechanical forces such as strong force, and Heisenberg uncertainty principles. Let me explain further, as electron gets closer to an atom the electrostatic & other quantum mechanical forces between the electron starts pulling it, and ...

2

Giving that most of the solar system's mass is concentrated in the sun, you may say that the order of magnitude of the number of atoms in the sun and in the solar system is the same. Thus, we may find this number by using the sun's mass and dividing it by the hydrogen's mass, because the sun is composed of it almost entirely: ...

6

A very brief Google search gets you the number 1,192,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (approximately $10^{57}$ atoms)- but in fact this is wrong. That value is derived from the mass of the objects of the solar system (mostly the Sun) divided by the mass of a proton (which is what most of the Sun is made of). But the ...

3

This won't work, though possibly not for the reason you think. High energy protons will go straight through a turbine blade without transferring any significant amount of momentum to it. The LHC uses a seven metre long block of graphite to catch the proton beam if there's a beam dump. Steel has greater stopping power than carbon, but even so a turbine blade ...

1

Well there is no reason of why it would not . But really what is the purpose of putting a turbine inside a particle accelerator.That beats the purpose of the accelerator to work without much resistance.If it is to generate energy or something, I doubt it's a viable solution.hydrogen as a gas is very hard to compress so I don't think you can make a solar ...

-1

This is a really good question and it puzzled me for many years. Physics is composed of many different theories, and as history has progressed, physicists have refined them or created new ones. My fav example is Newton's theory of gravity, which is great at explaining gravity for most applications; however, Einstein's are much more accurate and a more ...

1

Is it possible to decrease the mass of the object? Perhaps surprisingly the answer is yes. All you need to do is it drop it. Then some of the object's mass-energy, which we call potential energy, is converted into kinetic energy, which ends up getting dissipated. You're then left with a mass deficit. The mass of the object is reduced. It is known ...

0

How to explain what an electron is to someone new to physics? I think you can come up with an easy-reading explanation that's physically correct. There's plenty of clues in the literature if you're willing to play detective. For example see pair production. We quite literally make an electron (and a positron) out of light. And then when we annihilate ...

0

Here is a more complicated answer: I am going to try my best, ok? An electron is a negative elementary charge subatomic particle of an atom. It was once known as a beta particle, but it is now an electron. It takes electromagnetic, gravity, and weak interactions into play. In Coulombs, it's charge is approximately $-1.6 * 10^{-19} C$ and it's mass in ...

2

Electron is a particle with mass and a certain probability of being found at a given distance around the nucleus of an atom at a certain time. It caries a negative charge which makes chemical reactions possible since chemical reactions are driven by the electrostatic forces between electrons and positively charged protons which reside in the nucleus of the ...

1

Hmmm... I'll take a crack at it. An electron is a negatively charged subatomic particle that orbits the nucleus of an atom, which contains a positively charged subatomic particle called a proton and a neutral subatomic particle called a neutron.

0

At the quantum mechanical level experiments are scattering experiments. A nucleus is a composite of elementary particles. To "see" it, elementary particles are scattered off it and the scattering crossection is measured The cross section is an effective area that quantifies the intrinsic likelihood of a scattering event when an incident beam strikes a ...

Top 50 recent answers are included