in the magic of reality, richard dawkins gives a scale analogy that breaks your intuition in a productive way.
imagine two atomic nuclei scaled up to the size of footballs.
the distance between them would be about 15 kilometers.
now add electrons.
they wouldn’t be marbles or ping-pong balls. they’d be more like gnats or flies, buzzing vaguely somewhere in between. mostly not there in any meaningful sense.
what we call “solid” matter is:
- tiny dense nuclei
- absurd distances
- probabilistic electron clouds
- and a lot of NOTHING holding hands via forces
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