In geometry, points have no size. How true is this in real life? Can a point's size be determined by placing two metal balls together and measuring the area of the contact point?
by 
Aristocles
ANSWERS: 1
-
No, the point in geometry, defined in Euklid's famous axiom as "that which has no part", cannot be found in nature. When in real life you get smaller and smaller, at some point you hit the quantum world, and the positions get smeared out. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is valid: if you try to pin down the position of something, the impulse (velocity) becomes completely unknown. The quantum world starts at about the size of an atom, say, a few Angstroms. Much further down in size, at the Planck scale, it gets really weird: the meaning of "place" and "time" gets lost. In mathematics the point is really of size "zero", has no extension at all. So the point is not a physically sound concept. The closest we get is single atoms: with atomic force microscopes, we can see e.g. bumps on surfaces which are single atoms! http://www.ieee-virtual-museum.org/exhibit/exhibit.php?id=159272&lid=1&seq=3 This is smaller and more "point-like" than the contact point of two macroscopic objects.
RELATED QUESTIONS
Copyright 2023, Wired Ivy, LLC