Recent content by exfret

Ah, I see now. It is the electromagnetic force that bonds the atoms. But what happens when they get pressured? Do they simply get closer together, increasing the strength of the electromagnetic bonding force? I know what the four fundamental forces are: Strong force, which holds together the...

Well, I guess that that makes it more complicated. Anyways, if all molecules can be cooled down to a solid, then my point can still be made. Yes, a bridge can be built in many ways, but I was not trying to change the topic to how people make bridges when I wrote that analogy. I was just...

Sorry for being ambiguous. I'm not trying to get into complicated things like computers and living things and wood. In this thread, I usually mean substances as in elements or compounds, and I usually refer to a 'substance' as any element or compound. If you cool a material into a solid in a...

I just don't see how substances would bond in a way that doesn't involve electrons (at the atomic level). There are ionic bonds, which involve electrons switching atoms; metallic bonds, which involve electrons whizzing throughout a substance without a particular atom claiming them; and then...

Sorry, but I have been busy needing to do other things. I should have known that I wouldn't have much time to look into this stuff. I was just confused because I thought that cutting something in half should be a physical change, which means no chemical bonds are broken, but from what I...

You are using the balloon analogy wrongly. It does not imply edges or borders to the Universe. In fact, you are imagining a universe that is almost the complete opposite of the one in the balloon analogy. The surface of the balloon is the Universe imagined. In the balloon analogy, there is no...

Something I like to imagine is a ray. The "start" of that ray is a point. You can't go to a place "before" that point on the ray, just like you can't go to a time before the Big Bang in the Universe, because there is no place on the ray "before" that point. As previous posts have pointed...

Okay, I understand now. I thought that there would be some reason why objects stayed together that had nothing to do with chemical bonding. I hadn't realized that chemical bonding was so widespread. Just imagine, the atoms in every human are bonded (well, maybe not every atom, but most of them)...

Hmm. So what about the chair? Is the wood of my chair bonded? (Really it's not a wooden chair, but it isn't a man-eating chair either). Are so many everyday objects bonded so that when they are pushed down by gravity, they don't act like a liquid and 'melt' to the floor? Why do solids retain...

Technically speaking, no. Touching is when two objects are so close together that there isn't any space in between them. I guess it does actually depend on the way you define "touching," in which case, I have no right to say your wrong, but you have no right to say I'm wrong either. So every...

I do not oppose the idea of free will completely. I did make a small comment that I wasn't trying to take sides. I was only writing about free will because the previous replies to the thread seemed to disregard the fact that humans could be without free will. Also, the possibility of being...

I was kind of hoping that someone wouldn't just give me a link to a huge page on Wikipedia and say, "Here, the answer to your question is probably somewhere inside." I'm not lazy, but I'm not going to waste my time reading over a whole Wikipedia page that may not even contain the answer to my...

I thought this when I was pondering how, when you sit on a chair, you're butt isn't really touching the chair; it's just interacting at short distances with its electrons. After thinking about that, I realized that your torso isn't touching your butt either, it's just interacting at short...

I do not know for sure if morals are genetic, but it does not seem to me to be otherwise. Sure, there might be free will, which, by the way, might not even exist, but how would so many cultures choose basically the same set of morals? You do not see anyone killing anyone else because they...