Tag: Atoms

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Empty Space by John Hawkhead

bar talk
his atoms and mine
mostly empty space

by John Hawkhead

Atoms are 99% empty space, comprised of electrons in orbits around a nucleus made up of protons and neutrons. It follows then that approximately 99% of the human body is empty space with the remaining 1% (the electrons, neutrons and protons) being particles that have existed for billions of years.

At least this is the common mental image of an atom – the planetary model, originally proposed by Ernest Rutherford in 1911 and further refined by Niels Bohr in 1913. And yet…

Researchers increasingly understand that whilst electrons occupy discrete energy levels, they don’t always behave like discrete particles. Electrons are quantum objects – an electron is partly a wave and partly a particle. Under normal conditions an individual electron isn’t traveling in an orbital path through nothingness around its nuclei, but is instead spread out in an electron cloud.

As astrophysicist Dr Ethan Siegel says, “Inside your body, you aren’t mostly empty space. You’re mostly a series of electron clouds, all bound together by the quantum rules that govern the entire Universe.”

Further reading:

‘Due to the Space inside Atoms, You Are Mostly Made up of Empty Space’, Trevor English, Interesting Engineering: https://interestingengineering.com/science/due-to-the-space-inside-atoms-you-are-mostly-made-up-of-empty-space

‘Rutherford model’, Encyclopedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/science/Rutherford-model

‘You Are Not Mostly Empty Space’, Ethan Siegel, Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/04/16/you-are-not-mostly-empty-space/

Author bio:

John Hawkhead (@HawkheadJohn) has been writing haiku and illustrating for over 25 years. His work has been published all over the world and he has won a number of haiku competitions. John’s books of haiku and senryu, ‘Small Shadows’ and ‘Bone Moon’, are now available from Alba Publishing (http://www.albapublishing.com/).

Enjoyed John’s sciku? Check out more of his sciku here: ‘Dark matter’, ‘Chirality’, ‘Spooky Interaction’, ‘Dancing’, ‘Planetarium’, ‘Averages’, ‘New Beginning’, ‘Interactions’, and ‘Surface Tension’.

This sciku was previously published in MahMight haiku journal 2021.

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A Troika of Quantum Sciku by Jeffery Shevlen

Pauli Exclusion Principle

No suborbitals
Take electron pairs whose spins
consent to agree

Aufbau Principle

Electrons always fill
The lowest energy
Sub-orbitals first

Hund’s Rule

Before forming pairs
Electrons first fill each sub-
Orbital alone

These poems are broadly about the properties of atoms. More specifically they describe three simple rules that came from of the flowering of quantum discovery roughly 100 years ago. Each describes how electrons can populate the zones around an atom’s nucleus which are called orbitals. To me haikus, scikus, wonderfully compliment the subtle interactions of the subatomic realm. Egoless nature, all the way down.

Wikipedia devotes three pages to each of the three axioms. For a more detailed explanation wikipedia is a fine place to start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_exclusion_principle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aufbau_principle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hund%27s_rule_of_maximum_multiplicity

Jeffrey Shevlen is a stay at home dad and therefore a lifelong, if somewhat bruised, learner. He sends greetings from Ontario, Canada, formerly “Your’s to Discover”, now “A Place to Grow”.

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Entropy by Robert Erlandson

The second law of thermodynamics is a fundamental law of nature. One expression of this law states that the level of disorder in the universe is steadily increasing. Entropy is a measure of the system’s disorder, higher entropy means more disorder.

The image above is known as a ‘haiga’ – a coupling of poetry and imagery, the idea being to create a third art form that is greater than the sum of its parts. Below is an alternate version of the poem that takes the same starting point to create a tanka.

Further reading:

What is the Second Law of Thermodynamics https://www.livescience.com/50941-second-law-thermodynamics.html 

Second Law of Thermodynamics https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/thermo2.html

Entropy and the Second Law http://physics.bu.edu/~duffy/py105/Secondlaw.html

Robert Erlandson has published in ‘Haigaonline’, ‘Daily Haiga’, ‘Cattails’, ‘Ribbons’, and ‘Prune Juice’, and a chapbook, ‘AWE’, speaking to the incredible relationships between nature, art, and mathematics. You can find more of his poetry, including some more physics-based haiga here: https://www.circlepublications.net/ 

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Five and almost of a kind by Andrew Senior

I
Never let it be

Never let it be
forgot seeing is feeling
in another form

Sight the light of the blind
Sensation spent in a brain

II
I am most at home

I am most at home
in my imagination
as when science meets

crafted art, sees gravity’s
engines burning in the stars

III
Atoms are the shoes

Atoms are the shoes
of shape. We put them on to
walk this world. Smitten

with them we gallop over
its edge and into the dark

IV
How clever we are

How clever we are
to see what’s coming writing
on bark and spelling

with sticks taken from what had
already deciphered light

V
How dark a pupil

How dark a pupil
looks amplifying light’s streams
exchanging shadings

for meanings when trees convert
them only to be their lives

These five poems, “Shorts” as W.H. Auden used to call them, are part of a long series of meditations in poetry and essay about humility and ignorance, language and its limits and hence also the limits of knowledge. All in the context of science, particularly physics which is my over-riding interest.

Andrew Senior’s lifelong interest in science began as an often bed-ridden sickly child around the age of eight or nine with Astronomy. His professional career was in IT in the world of Unix/Linux servers. But Andrew never gave up an interest in science which by then had expanded from physics into biology courtesy of the best layman source there then was: The Scientific American. Long retired Andrew has continued these interests much assisted by the Internet, puzzling over the ruthless determination of humans to acquire power, gambling with their own extinction in the classic casino manner.