Force between two atoms

[Little Bang]

Thanks Hall, I had to subscribe so that I could read the entire article. It was interesting and could be interpreted in the fashion I suggest. I don't like their idea of an extremely large graviton particle to explain their results. I've never been a big fan of some particle mediating the force of gravity.

[Jay-qu]

Thanks Q, I might do some calculations on that later today

LB I am not sure what you mean by an EM force between atoms that might be related to how we describe gravity, could you try and re-iterate that for me so I can understand better

[cwes99_03]

If the universe only contains these things, what causes the electron to travel around the proton?
Would the em forces of one atom cause a difference in the interaction between the proton and electron of the other atom?

We could think about this for a long time.

I would say that you are looking at a general set of possible distances which vary on the order of a few angstroms in distance from each other.

Set up the equations that define the forces for a certain set of arrangements of the atoms and their sub parts, then weight those equations with a rough percentage of how often the atoms would be in that configuration and you will have a rough approximation.

I think what you'll eventually be looking at is a wave law of attraction saying that on average the attractive force between the two atoms is 0 to whatever magnitude you want to calculate to (realizing that to calculate to the nano Newton you'd have to have a bunch more geometric arrangements for how the protons and electrons are respectively arranged with more accurate weighting of how often they might occur in that arrangement, and probably a supercomputer to help you calculate those values.

This is a good one for the philosophy truly sucks thread, as I don't see much value in thinking about this. But that might only be how little I can think about its applications.

[Little Bang]

Jay
The atoms A and B that I referred to in post #3. The proton of atom A will be attracted to the electron of atom B and the proton of B to the electron of A. Unlike charges attract, That attraction will decrease over distance and I suspect that the decrease wil be exactly like the decrease of gravity over distance.

[Jay-qu]

Well yeah that is true, its the inverse square law, the force between them decreases as a function of that applies for both gravity and electomagnetic forces.

[Qfwfq]

But the overall force doesn't go inverse square. That between the opposite charges is orders of magnitude larger than the gravitational attraction between them but is offset by the repulsion.

Originally Posted by Jay-qu

Thanks Q, I might do some calculations on that later today

Not an easy undertaking, it implies estimating how the orbitals are affected when the distance is not too many times the Bohr radius, which is where the force can be appreciable. Complicated.

My memories are vague but I think I only read that such computations had been done but without such a detailed description of the method; I'm really not sure even if you would succeed with estimates based on first order terms, with more elaborate perturbative methods or with iterative number crunching. Don't be disappointed if you just find yourself utterly lost.

[Jay-qu]

dont worry Im not dissapointed, the fun is in trying

[cwes99_03]

Gravity is proportional to one over the square of the distance. Likewise, EM is proportional to one over the square of the distance. Thus the inverse square law. I don't believe anyone here said that the EM force would be equal to the gravitational force at the same distance, just that they both decrease according to the inverse square law.

[Little Bang]

I had an interesting thought this morning. Jay said the atoms wouldn't come together with enough force to bond, he is right. The repulsive force of the electrons for each other and the protons for each other would prevent coming close enough for bonding but they would always remain in proximity with each other at a fixed distance except in this simplistic universe, wouldn't they eventually form a Bose-Einstein condensate? If this were true and there is a relationship between gravity and EM the two atoms would show no effects to a normal gravitational field.

[cwes99_03]

Little Bang I think you are making a leap to something you do not understand. Certainly if you don't know enough about atoms and EM you certainly do not understand Bose-Einstein principles of thermodynamics. Keep studying, but don't hop so much around. Stick with the original until you understand it. Or if you do understand it, I certainly haven't seen this demonstrated.