Why do atomic particles like electrons and protons not have inertia?

[seriously disabled]

Why don't atomic particles like electrons and protons have inertia like the macroscopic objects like space rocks and spacecraft for example?

 

Why are atomic objects like electrons not effected by Newton's laws of motion like the macroscopic objects are?

 

In other words, why are atomic objects like electrons not bound by the laws of Newtonian mechanics (such as inertia for example) like macroscopic objects are?

I'll try to frame my question better perhaps:

 

Why are the laws of physics so different between macroscopic objects (like spacecraft for example) and atomic objects like electrons (for example)?

Edited May 17, 2013 by seriously disabled

[swansont]

I'll try to frame my question better perhaps:

 

Why are the laws of physics so different between macroscopic objects (like spacecraft for example) and atomic objects like electrons (for example)?

 

 

We don't know. This "fundamental why" isn't the sort of question science can answer. Wo observe that they are and can model the behavior, and know that the fundamental description is that of waves, but we don't know why that is.

[MonDie]

 

This "fundamental why" isn't the sort of question science can answer.

 

When you say science cannot answer it, you are suggesting a limitation in the scientific method. Do scientists know definitely that this limitation is insuperable, or are you extrapolating from the general lack of ideas?

[EdEarl]

The scientific method is not causal of why we don't know the answer to your question.

 

Quantum mechanics has not been linked to classical physics and relativity, which may be why we don't know the answer to your question. The elusive "Theory of Everything" has not been discovered. Perhaps string theory will be explain everything, maybe not.

 

However, we may never know the answer, even if it is theoretically possible to know the answer, because tools such as CERN are not big enough to discover strings (or whatever) that are smaller than quarks. I heard that it might require an atom smasher as big as the Milky Way galaxy to do the experiments necessary to verify string theory. But, I think we can learn more than we currently know without converting the galaxy into an atom smasher. Progress is often slow. Humanity has been studying the universe for only a 100,000 years or so. Give us a bit more time.

[swansont]

When you say science cannot answer it, you are suggesting a limitation in the scientific method. Do scientists know definitely that this limitation is insuperable, or are you extrapolating from the general lack of ideas?

 

It's a limitation of there being no underlying, "more fundamental" framework with which one can explain QM. Maybe someone comes up with one someday, I don't know, but that will only push the problem down a layer.

 

When you step away from the issue a little, you recognize that physics is basically all math, with the added caveat that the math has to agree with nature, which constrains the math: nature adds boundary conditions. But Gödel's incompleteness theorem tells us that a self-consistent system of maths cannot also be complete — there are things that are true that you can't prove. I don't know if there's a formalism that maps this onto science, but it's a hint that there will always be parts of science that simply cannot be explained by the science. Maybe that goes away with the boundary conditions (i.e. the wave nature of QM being inferred from observation, rather than some more fundamental theory), maybe it doesn't — I don't know the answer to that.

[Enthalpy]

Fundamental particles with a mass, like electrons and protons, do have inertia. In much the same way as a rock.

 

Under some circumstances, like in an atom, it's more the notions of position and speed that differ from the comprehension we get through rocks.

[MigL]

To add further to Enthalpy's point, ALL particles follow Newton's laws of motion , except at high energies and speeds and extreme space-time curvature. At a certain scale however, quantum mechanics imposes a sort of 'smearing-out' effect on certain observables due to its probabilistic nature.

Edited May 18, 2013 by MigL

[MM6]

Electrons and protons do have inertia because they have mass.

[Markus Hanke]

Why don't atomic particles like electrons and protons have inertia like the macroscopic objects like space rocks and spacecraft for example?

 

They do have inertia, just like all bodies with non-vanishing rest mass. It is just that their gravitational interaction is extremely small.

 

Why are atomic objects like electrons not effected by Newton's laws of motion like the macroscopic objects are?

 

They are effected by Newton's laws.

 

Why are the laws of physics so different between macroscopic objects (like spacecraft for example) and atomic objects like electrons (for example)?

 

They are not different, both domains obey the same set of laws of mechanics, being quantum mechanics. It is just that for macroscopic objects, quantum effects become so vanishingly small as to be entirely negligible, thereby reducing the observable laws to standard Newtonian mechanics. In the microscopic domain that is not the case, so the laws "look" different at first glance. In other words - Newtonian mechanics is just a subset of quantum mechanics for systems where quantum effects are negligible.

 

Difficulties arise once we leave the domain of applicability of Newtonian mechanics, namely once we get into the domain of General Relativity; this is because GR is most definitely not a subset of quantum mechanics, so there appears to be a contradiction here. For that reason, finding a self-consistent model of quantum gravity is one of the core areas of research in theoretical physics at present.

Edited June 11, 2013 by Markus Hanke