• Question: what is the universe made of ?

    Asked by to Ian on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Ian Stephenson

      Ian Stephenson answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Let me give you the engineering answer.

      Essentially nothing. The gaps between the stars is immense, and theres nothing there. Even within the solar system the actually bits that have anything in are pretty negligible. I don’t have a figure but its 99.99999…as many 9’s as you like….9999% empty.

      Even the bits that do have something in, are essentially made from atoms. But even atoms are basically empty space… when we draw them, we draw the protons and neutrons in the middle, with atoms going around, but that’s not to scale – drawn to scale there would be a tiny dot in the middle, a huge gap and some even tinier dots for the electrons. An atom is basically 99.999…..99% empty space too.

      with all this nothingness it’s pretty amazing that you’ve even noticed that there’s stuff in the universe at all. You can probably ignore it, as there’s so little of it it might as well not even be there 😉

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