VOID

Once upon a time when I was relatively smaller (in size, shape, age and also in thinking) I heard an astonishing fact. It goes like this “Only 29.2% of earth’s surface is land and rest is water (70.8%)”. “My goodness” I shouted and the reaction was pretty obvious because I never found great deal of water when I traveled around (It was more obvious in summer when me and my brother after finishing our morning school had to walk almost a mile to transport water from ever shrinking small well). Yes I knew earlier from my school textbooks that there are cool stuffs like seas and oceans as well but it never came to my imagination that water is actually more than land. To add to this astonishment I later found that water is responsible for 61.8% of human body weight.

I still do read, hear and participate in “water talk”. It seems human always find enjoyment in knowing the percentage of water in every imaginable object. The “% of water” talk goes from coconut to cocktail, from brain to bread and from mango to mars. But for the sake of change and also to make these talks even more interesting, today I have taken another entity in consideration instead of water and that coincidentally is the title of the story “Void”. We all know that an atom is the smallest unit of an element that retains the chemical properties of that element. In an Atom, Protons and neutrons are approximately the same size, while electrons are very much smaller. Now to take the discussion further lets take the example of a helium atom. If a basketball were used to represent the nucleus of a helium atom, then, on the same scale, softballs could represent the individual protons and neutrons, while large garden peas could represent the electrons. In this case, the diameter of an electron’s orbit would be approximately equal to the length of 250 American football fields [1]. Thus, the majority of an atom consists of void. If majority of atom is void then majority of us is void and it applies to everything around us. Yes, that’s the point I was trying to make. Now, just imagine your size excluding the void.

The bible says “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.” (Mark 10:25). But if all the empty space were removed from the atoms it would be possible for the camel to pass through the eye of a needle (Good news for rich man?). Oops wait a minute if all the void were removed from the atoms if will not only shrink the camel but also the needle. (Better luck next time “rich man”)


1. Bebop to the Boolean Boogie by Clive Maxfield.