Are Atoms Tiny Solar Systems?

[allhart]

Its stretching it ,but I am curious any how???.Nothing gained nothing lost. The locomotive motion in atoms and their basic building blocks and our planets are basically spinning on the same principles. Magnetic pulses of motion in a neg. or pos. pulls, makes the field of orbit in all things. Like right and wrong.
http://www.school-for-champions.com/...solaratoms.htm

 

[Axioma]

No. The little illustration with the big bunch of protons and neutrons being orbited by electrons is an extremely outdated concept of what an atom looks like.

For starters, electrons aren't even particles. Hell, for all intents and purposes, they don't even have such properties as "location" or "speed", just standing waves of probability functions.

 

[PaladinofByzantium]

Yay electron clouds. We know where things PROBABLY are but then we can't know how fast they're going. Heisenberg, you really made stuff harder on physics students.

 

[Axioma]

Note however that despite the fact that electrons aren't little planets or particles, and don't really have locations as such, they still have orbits.

An orbit in this case is best imagined as a closed portion of space around the core of the atom on which the electron can be found. In other words, you can't tell where the electron IS, but you can be sure that the list of places where the electron MIGHT be is confined to the space of the orbit.

This is due to quantum mechanics, which in this case means that energy is added and taken away from electrons in "quants", which means specifically sized packages of energy. It is impossible to give an electron half a quant of energy, because at this point you've zoomed in so small that you can no longer divide quantities indefinately.

The orbits exist because of this quantum nature, because each represents a certain amount of energy an electron might have. An electron can't be between orbits, because it physically can't have the amount of energy required to be between orbits, because you can never have an amount of energy that isn't a whole number of quants of energy. If you add energy to an electron, it skips up an orbit.

 

[PaladinofByzantium]

Yeah, reading those probability cloud charts is probably one of the worst parts about assisting in the lab here.

 

[Autumnleaf]

Its stretching it ,but I am curious any how???.Nothing gained nothing lost. The locomotive motion in atoms and their basic building blocks and our planets are basically spinning on the same principles. Magnetic pulses of motion in a neg. or pos. pulls, makes the field of orbit in all things. Like right and wrong.
http://www.school-for-champions.com/...solaratoms.htm

That was the old model. It still has a place among inorganic chem 101 students.

The new model is more complex, and much more interesting if you are inclined to learn about it.

 

[lawtonfogle]

No. The little illustration with the big bunch of protons and neutrons being orbited by electrons is an extremely outdated concept of what an atom looks like.

For starters, electrons aren't even particles. Hell, for all intents and purposes, they don't even have such properties as "location" or "speed", just standing waves of probability functions.

That's what she said (and what pretty much covers my response).

 

[Chesterton]

Regardless of the inaccuracy of the analogy made from actual physical properties, I still like the question in regard to the analogy made between large and small things. It’s a sufficient answer to the objection that a human-loving Creator can’t exist because the universe is too big in relation to the miniscule space occupied by humans. It’s a foolish argument based on a human-centric presumption: for all we know, the cosmos which appears so vast to humans could actually be a very tiny space.

 

[morningstar2651]

 

[Floatingaxe]

Its stretching it ,but I am curious any how???.Nothing gained nothing lost. The locomotive motion in atoms and their basic building blocks and our planets are basically spinning on the same principles. Magnetic pulses of motion in a neg. or pos. pulls, makes the field of orbit in all things. Like right and wrong.
http://www.school-for-champions.com/...solaratoms.htm

I have had the same thoughts for decades! Good to see I am not alone!

 

[lady.amarant]

Hahahaha for the webcomic! Brilliant. Dresden Codak is awesome.

Allhart and Chesterton:

I get what you are getting at - sort of the "As above so below" principle of the macrocosm reflecting the microcosm. I've thought about it some myself, but as the other posters demonstrate, our concrete, physical macrocosm really is nothing like the quantum world.

HOWEVER ...

A lot of work is being done in physics at the moment around particularly String Theory and M Theory that seeks to put the world of the very large - gravity, on the same playing field as the world of the very small - the quantum world. One of the key goals of the new particle accelerator built at CERN (the one everybody was afraid was going to create a black hole) has to do with finding physical evidence for a theorised particle called a Higgs-Boson. The Higgs particle is thought to be responsible for mass, and through a process known as spontaneous symmetry breaking, also for big bangs - basically how it works is that you have an existing universe, a higgs reaches a certain energy level causing symmetry breaking, and the higgs kind-of implodes into a new universe that branches off from the existing one.

Key to this is the question of gravity, and why this force seems to be so much weaker than all the others (electro-weak and nuclear are orders of magnitude stronger). One theory holds that Gravity is a kind of an inter-universal force that permeates throughout all universes and realities.

There's a persistent image in Hinduism and somewhat less-so in Buddhism, of the entirety of creation being no more than a thought in the mind of God, that the physical world is illusion - Maya. This is where the belief of enlightenment and Nirvana also come from - that we can see beyond this physical reality and lose ourselves in union with God.

Maybe gravity is the Mind of God, the thought-waves that make us real, and then the macrocosm of gravity really would be reflected in the microcosm of quantum physics. Anyway, wild speculation. Please ignore my ramblings.

~Simone.