this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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Well, the thing about atoms is that they arrange themselves in patterns to create those larger building blocks you speak of. Solar systems move much too slowly, so that by the time they would have arranged themselves into anything resembling the patterns exhibited by atoms, the heat death of the universe would have occurred.
The resemblance you see is orbit, but the major issue with uniting the orbit of atoms and the orbit of planets under one theorem is the scale of the forces at work. Gravity is many orders of magnitudes weaker than electromagnetic force holding electrons in place (and it needs to be that much stronger because of how much faster electrons move relative to their size than planets).
But now we're getting into string theory.
Great point. We should also add for @Vupperware 's benefit that subatomic orbitals the way they're envisioning them are a lie we tell ourselves because quantum mechanics is too damn weird to think about.
In fact, probably the greatest argument against atoms as smaller scale worlds is the fuckiness (technical term) of quantum mechanics on that scale. "Worlds" existing only as a probabilistic distribution might make existence difficult.
See I'm the opposite, the fuckiness at that scale is my greatest argument for their possible existence, accepting that their existence would be in a manner completely alien and unintelligible to me. There's SO MUCH fuckiness that anything is possible.