Dirac found that the ratio of the electric force to the gravitational force of an electron-proton pair is roughly equal to the ratio of the age of the universe to the time it takes light to traverse an atom.

Michael Flynn
About This Quote

The statement that Dirac made is about the amazing things that quantum mechanics can do to help us understand our universe. It all goes back to the idea that atoms are made up of protons and electrons. The question was, “Why are the masses of the electrons so small?” Well, if you could get rid of all of the electrons in an atom, then everything would collapse into a single proton. If you did that, then the proton would have to be enormously massive.

Therefore, the electron must exist in some other form than just a massless particle. This is where quantum mechanics comes in. The idea is that the electron-proton pair is so close together that it can act like one object. As you might know, gravity pulls these two particles together to form an electron-proton pair.

The force of gravity causes even more attraction because it doesn’t matter where you put the electron-proton pair in relation to your other objects. Even if you took it off the surface of the Earth, there would still be a gravitational force pulling it back down. The closer this pair gets to each other, the greater will be the gravitational force that draws them even closer together.

So when this process occurs, they form into one giant object with very little mass for each particle! The idea is that since there are many atoms in our universe, many electron-proton pairs are also forming around them at once. They are constantly hitting each other and creating more electron-proton pairs in each collision. So when we look at large groups of atoms or molecules, we find that they seem to have much less mass than expected based on their individual masses.

That’s why Einstein said that physics has become “Spooky Action at a Distance”!

Source: Eifelheim

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