Timeline for Why does Matter occupies space? Matter and space are two things... If Space does not has mass, why should matter have space-ful nature?
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| Aug 18, 2014 at 15:29 | comment | added | bright magus | @Martin: Which doesn't change the fact that in order to occupy certain space with non-zero probability, a particle needs to be at least capable of occupying this space, for which it needs to have extension. Null extension means null probability of occupying any space at all. Also, zero cannot be "spread" over certain space, and neither it can be divided. | |
| Aug 18, 2014 at 14:28 | comment | added | Martin | @brightmagus: Well, yes and no - and that's exactly what I try to say here: There are TWO notions of "occupying space". The one we have of a classical object, say, a football, occupying a certain amount of space and the quantum version, where two fermions cannot be in the same state and two states will have spatial probability distributions (indicating where it is likely to "find" the particle) that hardly overlap. | |
| Aug 13, 2014 at 8:56 | comment | added | bright magus | @Martin: "So, losley speaking, if a proton is at one place, this makes it unlikely for any other proton to be there." But, since particles "really don't have any extend in space, they don't really 'occupy' any space", there is no "there" to be occupied by two fermions. No extension means no spatial conflict, doesn't it? | |
| Apr 4, 2014 at 14:46 | comment | added | Martin | That's what I'm saying. An electron is believed to have no spatial extend. No elementary particle has such extend. However, since they are charged, where there is an electron, other electrons will most likely be further away - in a bound state like around an Atom, you can even calculate where the electrons will be and this space seems to be "occupied". A proton, which is not elementary, appears to have an extend because of the various forces. | |
| Apr 4, 2014 at 14:33 | comment | added | Prem | Tell me. Electron has a size, however small and elusive it may be... Then how can something that has spatial dimensions be believed to be indivisible? I think at the very core of indivisibility should be the idea zero-dimensional size... Then how can an electron be elementary and indivisible? Anything that is not 0 can be divided further.... Electrons can be... | |
| Apr 4, 2014 at 11:54 | comment | added | Martin | "elementary particles" are those particles, which we believe to be undivisible, i.e. electrons seem to be elementary, protons aren't (see also Wikipedia). Your definition of 'matter' as anything not 'space' is not very good, since it precludes an answer to your question: when matter is not space, then it can't occupy space, since wherever it is, there is no space. | |
| Apr 4, 2014 at 4:50 | comment | added | Prem | I used the word 'matter' in a broad sense to refer to anything in the world which is not 'space'. Please elaborate what you mean by 'elementary particles'. 'Protons and electron'? But protons and electrons are more like objects than particles. It might be a combination of too many zero-dimensional particles... If protons occupies a specific region of space which no other proton can, this is because the fundamental zero-dimensional 'pigments' of matter that combine to form a proton are held together in a way so not to allow any other particle in that specific region of space-time... | |
| Apr 3, 2014 at 21:49 | history | answered | Martin | CC BY-SA 3.0 |