True or false:
1. Each of us is made up of 7 octillion atoms
(7 followed 27 zeros) that are mostly empty space. If you could squeeze
all the empty space out of those atoms, you could reduce the entire
human race to the size of a sugar lump.
True. Look at this diagram of a hydrogen atom. Notice the distance
between the nucleus and the electron. At true scale this distance is
enormous. If you imagine the nucleus as a pea in the middle of a
football stadium, then the electron would be a gnat whizzing around the
very edge of the top row of seats.
If you could bring the gnat
right up close to the pea and eliminate all the empty space in between,
then you could reduce humanity to the size of a sugar lump.
In the
book Finn's mad scientist Uncle Al builds a machine that can squash out
some of this empty space, reducing Finn and a bunch of soldiers to
150th of their actual size.
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