Good day steemit! Are you all enjoying your levitation? You are sitting down? No no, you are actually not touching your chair. Welcome to my post about curious facts about ELECTRONS, allow me to take you on a little journey (that won't be too scary, I promise) into quantum world where things get weirder and weirder by the minute :)

So you have all learned about atoms in school, let me give you a little spoiler alert for the rest of this post, most of the things you learned is not entirely correct :) By saying correct, I mean not precise enough to be considered accurate.

image source

99.9 PERCENT OF THE ATOM'S VOLUME IS EMPTY SPACE

You know how the atom is made of the nucleus (that contains protons and neutrons) and the electrons orbiting it? The nucleus of an atom is extremely dense and contains almost all of the mass of the atom. Electrons have very little mass and orbit far away from the nucleus so 99.9% of an atom is empty space. There is a famous analogy with the sports arena, imagine that the atom was the size of an arena, the nucleus would be the size of a pea in the middle of it :)

ELECTRONS ARE TELEPORTING

That picture above, the famous one that you have all seen a million times is actually wrong. Electrons are not travelling, there are not "moving" at all, they are teleporting by disappearing in one place and appearing in another one. This is called a quantum leap, the electron "jumps" from one energy level to another. Oh and... Just to freak you out a bit more, when we are talking about an electron being in different places, we are talking about the probability of an electron to be found in different places. Let's look at another image, the probability of finding the electron at different energy levels in a hydrogen atom. That probability is represented by the colour. The lighter the colour the greater the chances that the electron would be found somewhere in that area.

electron in a hydrogen atom

YOU ARE LEVITATING RIGHT NOW

You have not touched anything in your life and you will not touch anything ever. You are levitating all the time.

All particles are attracted to those particles with an opposite charge and repelled from those similarly charged. Electrons are never in a direct contact with each other. When you are standing or sitting, the electrons in your body are repelling the electrons in the floor or in the chair, you are hovering above them, levitating if you prefer that term :)

why you can never actually touch anything

So how do you feel that you are touching stuff? The nerve cells in your body send signals to your brain that you are physically touching something when actually the sensation of touch is given by your electron's interaction with other electrons.

TINY LITTLE PARTICLES

People once believed molecules where the smallest, then they believed atom was the smallest. The word "atom" comes from Greek word "atomos", which means 'that which can't be split. Democritus was thinking that there must be a point where you could no longer cut something any smaller. Well... Now we know there are electrons and protons and neutrons, but did you know protons and neutrons are actually composed of even smaller particles? They are called quarks and gluons.

I hope you enjoyed this little educational journey, from more information please follow these links:
www.livescience.com
Jefferson lab
www.thoughtco.com
www.myinterestingfacts.com
www.telegraph.co.uk
futurism.com
www.thoughtco.com

This post is my entry for curious facts contest. The contest is held by @river-island and the point is to build a stronger community connections by presenting some valuable information to each other. If you have some interesting facts to share, visit curious-facts-contest-6 and share your information, and even if you don't want to participate in sharing, visit it anyway and learn some interesting stuff :)

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