ENDNOTES
Introduction
- Bohr, Niels, “On the constitution of atoms and molecules.” Philosophical
Magazine, 26: 1–24 (1913). If you really want to split the hairs of the
subatomic world, the volume of an atom (roughly 1 angstrom, or 10-10
meters in diameter) is about 15 orders of magnitude larger than the volume
of the nucleus (roughly 1 femtometer, or 10-15 meters in diameter)—
meaning the atom is roughly 99.9999999999999 percent empty space.
Although the electron cloud around the nucleus accounts for most of the
atom’s area, this cloud is mostly empty space, and the electrons within it are
minuscule to begin with. The highly dense nucleus contains most of the
mass of the atom. The relative size of an electron in reference to the nucleus
would be like the volume of a pea compared to an SUV, and the perimeter
of the electron cloud relative to the SUV would be about the size of
Washington State.
Chapter 1
- For example, see Amit Goswami, Ph.D., The Self-Aware Universe (New
York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1993). Also, the “Copenhagen interpretation” of
quantum theory developed by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang
Pauli, and others says, among other things, that “reality is identical with the
totality of observed phenomena (which means reality does not exist in the