Robert Krulwich

Yeah.

Or do you find something more ethereal, something you can't touch, something you can't pin down, something like, oh, a thought?

This is Jim's notion.

Well, to follow Jim's logic, he goes all the way back to the Greeks, to the first real attempt to get to what's really at the bottom of a rock.

So if I were an atomist, if I were looking for stuff, then I'd need some kind of thing that carried gravity.

All that Newton had to fill that void was a mathematical equation that told him how the sun and the earth interact.

And the thing is, it worked.

You could plug in the numbers and you could know how one was influencing the other.

But Newton had no idea at all why the equation worked.

He couldn't point to any like a little particle thing like a graviton and say, there's your reason.

It almost seemed like gravity was created from the equation itself.

And this disturbed a lot of people.

So you can think of this baseball, this nucleus, as a tiny dot all alone.

So it's basically, the atom is a big empty space.

Well, it doesn't feel that way.

Like, watch this.

I'm going to do this.

If my hands are all atoms, and as you say, atoms are mostly empty space, then why don't my hands just go right to each other like two clouds?

But you'll notice.

Isn't it more like my electrons don't like similar electrons, so the electrons in my hands just hate the electrons in the other hand?