Eli5 why is that an atom is 99,6 % empty space ?
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You’ve learned about protons, neutrons and electrons right? The building blocks of atoms.
Well. Diagrams tend to show them as large spheres in the center, and electrons as smaller spheres orbiting on nice circles.
That scale is really really exaggerated. For even the heaviest atoms, the nucleus is tiny in comparison to the orbits of even the nearest electrons.
You’d never ever see them if diagrams were to scale, so they make them much larger.
I picture the atom like the sphere of the solar system out to the oort cloud. Mostly empty except for a few tiny planets and debris
Imagine I am spinning around with my arms out holding hammers. Most of the space around me isn’t an arm swinging a hammer, but it still is clearing up a lot of space around me. So how close would you come to me? All the space around me that might end up with a hammer swinging through it is probably space you wouldn’t stand in, so that space now belongs to me. My torso is the nucleus and the hammers are the electrons. Now imagine my arms are miles long, and moving so fast that you can’t keep up. All that space is still mine, because entering that space will, eventually, get you hammered!
Atoms/subatomic particles don’t work the same as our world does and empty vs full isn’t as simple basically. I don’t think it’s possible to actually explain it to a 5 year old, I was trying but there’s a lot of underlying concepts and you’d probably need at least high school chem or physics to understand which obviously a 5 year old hasn’t experienced.
Makes it awfully sound like the whole universe is a single atom in another universe which is also an atom in another universe and so on. Maybe that empty space isn’t so empty, maybe the matter that makes up that empty space isn’t visible to our eyes.
This is related to “why don’t electrons spiral into the nucleus?”. Electrons have specific energy levels. Too close to the nucleus is not an allowed energy level, so electrons don’t go there. I know, not a satisfying answer.
An atom is mostly empty space in the same way that a helicopter’s rotor is mostly empty space. Still not gonna stick your hand in there while it’s running, right?
Think of an atom like a planet with a moon. The planet is the nucleus, and the moon is an electron. What’s in between? Nothing.
Its empty because the electron is extremely tiny and the nucleus is extremely tiny and once they come within that distance to each other, the electron cannot get any closer to the nucleus. The reason is why it can’t get any closer is not understood well.
The only explanation that I’ve come across is that the electron has no way to lose more energy, and it has to lose energy to come closer to the nucleus.
Also I say tiny just to answer the question which refers to an outdated(but still useful) model of the atom. There is no proper way to talk about the size of sub atomic particles. Nowadays atoms are modelled differently and the concept of emptiness becomes fuzzy.
It’s like this small clump of balls in a big cloud of tiny electrons flying around it, like flea in a fish market
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