If atoms are 99,9% emptiness, how can they keep things together ? Like, if my skin is 99,9% emptiness, why is it able to keep blood and organs in it ?
In: Chemistry
The following is one better [Examples](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTY1Kje0yLg) I know of when it comes to explaining how a small object can influence other masses over relatively large distances.
Stuff makes indentations on space which cause nearby stuff to fall towards it.
imagine each atom has a big invisible forcefield around it that repels other atoms. if two atoms get too close, the forcefields bounce off each other, but the atoms themselves (the nuclei) never touch.
But sometimes the forcefields merge and the atoms share a forcefield, which is a chemical bond.
those forcefields are electron clouds (orbitals).
Look at a box fan or ceiling fan. When they spin fast it looks like they form a solid ring.
Electrons whiz around the nucleus of an atom and kinda do the same thing, but in a sphere.
Imagine the “sphere” they form as a balloon (atom).
Glue those balloons together, that makes up stuff.
Now when different sets of balloons try to touch, imagine electrons as magnets.
North and south poles attract. Like poles repel. Electrons kinda work like that.
They are negative and repel other negatives. This repelling force works for groups of balloons that aren’t glued together.
I mean, in a way, it isn’t really “emptiness” the universe is full of non valence quantum particles and anti particles: constantly coming into existence and annihilating each other. What we call protons and neutrons are really just coordinates in spacetime in which there are three more quarks than anti quarks. There could be 1,000,003 quarks and 1,000,000 anti quarks within those coordinates at a particular point in time, but after that point in time, 1,000,000 quarks and anti quarks will have annihilated eachother, and 1,000,000 new quarks and antiquarks will have appeared, and that goes on forever: quarks and anti quarks constantly appearing and disappearing, but the fact that there are 3 more quarks than anti quarks means that there is a net valence which describes the net properties that such coordinates will have at any particular point in time, which ultimately cause that set of coordinates to have particular properties that contrast it with the conditions of other coordinates. And you can describe those properties with statistical equations that take into account those facts.
So even though most space does not have a lot of valence in it, the fact that some space does means that it will interact with itself and other valence around it such that there are noticeable properties particular to some conditions of valence that are different from others, and we call those properties “forces”. So, in a way: matter itself, the matter that we are made of, exists because there is an imbalance in the amount of underlying quantum particles in the universe at any one time: in the space that makes up that matter, we can describe it as containing a slightly higher amount of particles than anti particles, and chemistry is ultimately based on the notion that that certain kinds of imbalance behaves in particular and predictable ways ways such that it forms larger particles which form atoms which form chemicals which form larger objects which form the universe, or, at least, a universe which is dynamic (like, there could be hypothetical universes out there with billions of times more particles and anti particles, but if they are truly equal in quantity, then they will all annihilate each other so fast and in such equilibrium that the universe would appear as if nothing is happening within it).
It seems like you are thinking of protons and electrons in an atom as some sort hard, impenetrable bodies of a certain size — like tiny billiard balls. If you are under this impression, then you would think that contact forces between these billiard balls are the only real forces that exist — and so any action-at-a-distance, like gravity or magnetism — likely seems very mysterious to you.
Actually it’s the other way around. Everything in the universe is action at a distance. Contact forces are just an example of action over very tiny, tiny distances.
Atoms in a molecule or in a solid material are held together by electromagnetic forces — the electrons in one atom are attracted to the protons in the other atom, however the two atoms can’t get too close together or else the protons in the nucleus will start to repel each other. There is a certain distance where these attractive and repulsive forces cancel out, and that is what make atoms “bond” to each other.
This bond distance is much larger than the “size” of the proton and electron (actually protons and electrons don’t really have a “size” — again they’re not billiard balls, it’s better to think of them as fuzzy clouds). But still pretty tiny, in human terms. Depending on a lot of factors, these bonds might be so rigid that the atoms can’t move around at all (like in a solid), or they might allow for some viscosity (in a liquid), or they might be so weak as to be non-existent (as in a gas).
The keeping blood in is the easy part. think of atoms as expanded polystyrene foam but the balls are bubbles for scale. (Obviously bubbles sounds like a bad analogy because of surface tension and the like appearing weak.) An atom would be an individual bubble. The ~ 99.9% emptiness is more because of the relation between the Protons, Neutrons and Electrons, otherwise you would have Neutron star like matter with Protons, Neutrons and Electrons all squashed together with relative ~ 99.9% fullness.
Regarding your second question: the thing that noone seems to have mentioned is the scale of things here. The average number of atoms in each cell is estimated around 100 TRILLION. Thats each individual blood cell, or one of the hundreds of millions of cells that make up each of your organs. Asking how skin can contain blood is akin to asking how a chainlink fence can contain a dog, but the dog is millions of times larger than the holes in the fence
Its hard to eli5 atoms and how they interact with each other but theres some pretty good answers here so not gonna touch that one
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