Hi Roger B., Everything at the scale of atoms, fermions, bosons, quarks, and vibrating strings (membranes) of energy are pure vacuums, 4-D space-time coordinate systems that forever "boil", as pairs of oppositely "charged", otherwise exactly equal events appear very briefly at all energies, and collapse back together into pairs of vibrating 4-D space-time coorrdinate systems, called massless photons, moving outward at exactly the speed of light --
like a flat swimming pool of perfectly frictionless liquid, every wave is half above and half below the flat surface as it moves and interacts forever with other such waves, so that meanwhile at every instant, the ups and downs add up to... zero... same flatness -- this is why the entire universe can expand outward from a single very tiny "vacuum fluctuation" 13,780 million years ago, and still add to to practically nothing... Dirac invented this about 1928 for the electron-positron, before the positron was found in cosmic ray photos in 1932 -- He had to do it in order to combine Maxwell's electromagnetism with Einstein's general relativity with quantum mechanics -- that forced the invention of anti-matter and the boiling paradigm for the vacuum. By 1946, this got upgraded into relativistic quantum electro-dynamics, which explained highly accurate values of the fine structure constant for subtle deviations in the energy levels of hydrogen atoms, the Lamb shift. So, in physics, there's no solid thing anywhere, ever -- it's all about vibrating geometry in as many space dimensions as 10, whatever that means! Rutherford proved that inside the gold atom was space as empty as the solar system, with all the weight (energy) concentrated in a nucleus, with volume that was 1/10E12 = 0.000,000,000,001 tinier than the volume of the atom. What space and time really are, are hot questions in recent decades, with a lot of profound progress in recent years -- i.e. what does quantum mechanics really mean, anyway? I'd say, the impending revolution in physics ( and philosophy! ) will be far more strange than what has happened since 1898 -- that's perpetual exponential evolution within an actual single fractal hyperinfinity... within the community of service, Rich Murray On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 7:36 PM, Roger B <[email protected]> wrote: > Disappointing, Joe. 5% is just a little on the slow side, relativity > speaking. (:->) I would not call 5% a data point. > > Roger > > > Date: Tue, 4 Jun 2013 19:24:42 -0700 > > From: [email protected] > > To: [email protected] > > > Subject: Re: [Vo]:I confess > > > > Actually, Rutherford's gold foil experiment used alpha particles, > > generated by Radon radioactive decay. > > > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geiger%E2%80%93Marsden_experiment > > > > According to http://www.epa.gov/radiation/understand/alpha.html and > > http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Alpha_decay alpha particles > > typically have an energy around 5 MeV which works out to be a velocity > > of 5% that of light. > > > > - Joe > > > > On 6/4/2013 6:12 PM, leaking pen wrote: > > > I do know that beta particles, used in the famous gold foil > > experiments, are .75 c in vacuum, but often faster than c in other > > materials. > > > > > > > > > On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 5:26 PM, Roger B <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > > > > I confess to being an ignoramus. I confess to having only a B.A. > > in psychology, a B.A. in philosophy, and an A.S. in electronics > > technology. I am, however, a philosophical savant. > > > > > > I have a question that I have asked several times but have never > > gotten an answer. By what means do conventional physicist probe and > > understand the innards of the atom? What is the minimum speed of the > > particles that they shoot into the atom to see what is there? Do they > > ever use some version of light to understand the innards of the atom? > > > > > > If, as I suppose, and I could be wrong, all of the particles > > "shot" into the atom are traveling close to the speed of light, then > > could not there be some unknown characteristic at this speed, perhaps as > > yet unknown to us, that causes things inside the atom to behave > > differently than from how they would behave if the probing particle were > > going much slower. For example, what if the almost light speed particle > > had a bow wave in front of it as it flew through the aether? If every > > single particle that was used to probe the inside of the atom were > > traveling at .99 the speed of light, then this "distortion" would be the > > same in every experiment, and one aspect of this limited view inside the > > atom we might call the "Coulomb Barrier". > > > > > > Is this all possible? Or am I off base? > > > > > > > > > Roger Bird > > > Colorado > > > > > >
