Compacting matter into a point

[brad89]

I have been thinking. Just wonder what you might think as well.

 

Not to mention, I don't have much thought behind it other than the fact that it doesn't make sense. But why is matter allowed to 'touch' other matter? I have no idea where this came from. I just had an idea about taking a microscope and zooming in infinitely at an atom. It appears together, like a particle is a sphere. But I just tried to zoom in even closer on this imaginary atom. And what I thought was that we can't zoom to a point where matter is 'smooth' and lacks any sort of hole or bump or anything. Here is another thought to go along with it that I thought could act as some sort of proof.

 

Imagine a perfect sphere. Then imagine touching this perfect sphere to another one. I think that the point in which they touch would be 0 dimensional, one you could pass a line through. I equated this to not touching at all.

 

I brought this up to a geometry teacher, and she told me that she agreed on the spheres touching at a 0 D point, but she also told me that she still believed they were touching.

 

Then this thought led to my final thought, matter compressed to a point. Picture this. A hollow cube. Now take two spheres and place them inside the cube. They touch the sides of the cube and each other. Observe the cube with the spheres. There is still room inside the cube everywhere the spheres aren't touching. I realized that you could jam pack it full of spheres. You could pack these spots full of spheres, and as long as the spheres keep getting smaller, you could pack the spot infinitely! Keep on going forever. If there are only spheres, then there will always be empty room on the outside of them. You can pack this room with smaller spheres, then pack that room with smaller spheres so on and so on. This means that lengths of matter stretches infinitely beyond the size of atoms! I am sure this has been thought of, but what I wonder is if this presents a solution to singularities.

[starbug1]

I was under the assumption that spheres cannot be compacted beyond the dimentions of an atom, except maybe in a neutron star. And why is it you can pack an infinite number of spheres? Not exactly sure what you mean.

[[Tycho?]]

I have been thinking. Just wonder what you might think as well.

 

Not to mention' date=' I don't have much thought behind it other than the fact that it doesn't make sense. But why is matter allowed to 'touch' other matter? I have no idea where this came from. I just had an idea about taking a microscope and zooming in infinitely at an atom. It appears together, like a particle is a sphere. But I just tried to zoom in even closer on this imaginary atom. And what I thought was that we can't zoom to a point where matter is 'smooth' and lacks any sort of hole or bump or anything. Here is another thought to go along with it that I thought could act as some sort of proof.

 

Imagine a perfect sphere. Then imagine touching this perfect sphere to another one. I think that the point in which they touch would be 0 dimensional, one you could pass a line through. I equated this to not touching at all.

 

I brought this up to a geometry teacher, and she told me that she agreed on the spheres touching at a 0 D point, but she also told me that she still believed they were touching.

 

Then this thought led to my final thought, matter compressed to a point. Picture this. A hollow cube. Now take two spheres and place them inside the cube. They touch the sides of the cube and each other. Observe the cube with the spheres. There is still room inside the cube everywhere the spheres aren't touching. I realized that you could jam pack it full of spheres. You could pack these spots full of spheres, and as long as the spheres keep getting smaller, you could pack the spot infinitely! Keep on going forever. If there are only spheres, then there will always be empty room on the outside of them. You can pack this room with smaller spheres, then pack that room with smaller spheres so on and so on. This means that lengths of matter stretches infinitely beyond the size of atoms! I am sure this has been thought of, but what I wonder is if this presents a solution to singularities.[/quote']

 

Well you're kinda mixing yourself around here. You're basically proposing the idea of infinite divisibility, no matter how small a piece of matter you can get, you can always just cut it in half to make it smaller. This was popular among most of the Greek philosophers and I actually thought this up too when I was younger.

 

But the point here is that with molecules and atoms matter is NOT infinitly divisible, at least as far as we have been able to determine. You cannot have a massive sphere of arbitrarly small size. You go down far enough, and you end up with just a single molecule (most of which are not spherical). From there you could go to the electrons, and the atomic nucleus. Here you can still talk about spheres in the geometrical sense; you can picture in your mind a perfect sphere sitting next to this atomic nucleus. But all it will be is imaginary. One these kind of scales talking about massive spheres just doesn't make sense, you get into feilds and force carriers and the uncertainty principal and stuff like that. Matter does not get "smooth" as you go down to these scales, the atom for example is mostly empty space, with mass concentrated in the center.

 

Basically, just because you can imagine something smaller, does not mean that anything smaller actually exists in the real world.

[TeenKing]

If it is a 'sphere' explain how it can have no dimensions meaning it does not exist at all?

[sunspot]

If we look at atoms they are mostly space, with tiny electrons filling in the volume. The nucleus is less than 1%. If we compress an atom, this should mean less space for the electron clouds or orbitals. The logical result would be the outer orbitals disappearing and only the lower orbitals, which are viable in the reduced space, remaining.

[[Tycho?]]

If we look at atoms they are mostly space, with tiny electrons filling in the volume. The nucleus is less than 1%. If we compress an atom, this should mean less space for the electron clouds or orbitals. The logical result would be the outer orbitals disappearing and only the lower orbitals, which are viable in the reduced space, remaining.

 

I doubt it, particularly since electron orbitals arn't exactly logical to begin with, I highly douby applying such basic reasoning to such complicated physics will yeild a result that makes sense. You'll definately need some sort of source to back this up.

[yammers]

Have a look!http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/

[danny8522003]

According to string theory (what i understand of it anyway), the smallest 'thing' is a string of plancks length.