Line of ants
Black doodles in space
Take our ant (from the second article in this module) scurrying around the floor; if it were moving in a defined space on the kitchen floor at hundreds of body lengths/second (like saharan silver ants) it would cover that whole space several times over in one minute. It would no longer look like an ant, but a weave of black doodles in that space.
Our fast moving ant would seem as an invisible magic marker moving across the floor, making black dots that circle in one direction, then curve in another. This is one ant! it creates the image of 1-dimensional broken lines across the floor.
Suppose one increased the speed of that ant to millions of body lengths/second and placed the ant in the bottom of a white box that was one foot squared (assuming the ant cannot climb the walls). The ant would be whizzing across the floor of the box, such that it would cover that whole white surface thousands of times/second.
Changing our reality
To our eye, the bottom of the box would look like a mosaic of black: almost 100% of the surface would have an ant there multiple times each blink of an eye. Here we have a 0-dimensional creature creating a 2-dimensional reality.
This 2-dimensional image that our brain sees is not just an image; the ant is really there in all positions on the floor of the box for all practical purposes - in our human time scale of the blink of an eye. That is, if I touched any part of the bottom of the box with a thin reed, there would be an ant in that position. My time scale - using a reed to touch the ants - is in the 1/3 of a second range. The ant has been in that position that I am touching in that 1/3 of a second hundreds of times.
It is practically squatting there.
It is only one ant, but the space on the floor of that white box - to our eyes - looks black. It is the speed and the movement that changes a 0-dimensional object (an ant) into a a 2-dimensional space (the surface of the floor of the box).
Fast moving ants: BLS/sec = body lengths/second
How does this apply to electrons?
The concept applies to electrons. Electrons travel at an estimated 2.2 million miles/hour (3.6 million km/hour or 1,000 km/sec). This means that each microsecond, an electron has travelled 1 meter.
It is our electrons, with their virtually continuous motion, that shepherd molecular restructuring, nudging an atom from one state to another one.
Chemical bonds - a grouping of optimal and "solid" electron positions - are formed within our millisecond-world time frame to create a definite reality.
chemical bonds
Picture credits:
- By stocker1970. Light trails, ID: 43523230.
- Photo by Adam Littman Davis on Unsplash.
- Grafixo. Fast moving ants: BLS/sec = body lengths/second; Dec 2021.
- By honglouwawa. Various molecular model, ID: 209116279.