- March 9th, 2023, 7:29 pm
#437209
Yeah great. Insult people for no reason based on mistaken identity and then not admit the error or apologise. Go for it! Great philosophy? I think not.
If atoms are a primitive concept, what is the alternative? What I see here are ad hominem attacks, either implied or direct, and criticisms of educational models that probably are outmoded - but the models have been deliberately simplified to be usable for students.
It's like defining planets. There's not actually eight planets, there's hundreds. However, the old model was kept simple for educational purposes. There is always the risk of swamping students with dizzying complexity, so the old simple models are added to rather than replaced. Naturally, those who don't work in the field will often have a wrongful idea about the phenomena based on the oversimplifications, mistaking the map for the territory, but most experts know better (and their interest wasn't dampened by information overload too early).
Whatever, I like biology more than chemistry and physics. Anyone wanting to test their physics-based ideas would ideally post them to physics forums, to an audience who more intimately know the subject matter. I'd be interested to see the responses if this was posted to a physics forum. It would be entertaining, if nothing else.
My own simple understanding is that an atom consists of three extremely small and dense quarks zipping around each other at something like light speed within an extremely small volume, held in by the gluons of the strong nuclear force, and the whole edifice has a positive charge. Around this hyper-dense nucleus is a field of negatively charged electrons. These entities join together in different ways, making up molecules.
Still, I just think of them all as tiny energetic dimples in the fabric of reality with variant qualities but, as I say, I'm not a physicist.