Discover the 14 Most Fascinating and Entertaining Fun Facts About Matter!

1. Basketball-sized Atoms

If basketballs and salt had an atomic baby, they’d create hydrogen: In the fantastic realm where atoms are the size of basketballs, the proton at the heart of a hydrogen atom would be a mere grain of salt. Talk about empty nest syndrome – a hydrogen atom consists of 99.9999999999996% empty space, with its proton and electron barely occupying 0.0000000000004% of the total volume. Next time you encounter a basketball, ponder the emptiness of the matter in our reality!
Source => education.jlab.org

2. Jamming Atoms

Next time you're at a rock concert, don't forget to feature the actual rock stars: those jiggling atoms in the solid objects around you, jamming harder than any band, all while being completely invisible to the moshing crowd! Here's your backstage pass: The constant vibrations of atoms within a solid can be studied through methods like neutron scattering, infrared spectroscopy, or atomic force microscopy, revealing the atomic oscillations responsible for phenomena like heat capacity reduction at low temperatures and the propagation of sound and heat through materials, known as phonons.
Source => physics.stackexchange.com

Did you know that atoms are experts at social distancing? Discover how 99.99% of empty space within atoms plays a huge role in the world of particles!

=> Fun Facts about Atoms

3. Electrifying Touch

Feeling untouchable, as an electrifying kind of royalty? You technically are, courtesy of your atomic entourage: Atoms have a structure where electrons repel each other, so when we "touch" something, our electrons maintain an unfathomably tiny distance from the object, merely interacting with its electromagnetic field, chemical bonds, and friction, while our brains interpret the sensation as touch.
Source => futurism.com

4. Gossiping Gas Particles

Did you hear about the gas particles that waltzed into a room? They're quite the energetic social butterflies you see, always mingling, buzzing and spreading gossip from one corner to the other: In matter, gases primarily have lower densities than solids and liquids because their particles are well-spaced, possess a great deal of kinetic energy, and move rapidly. Due to this, they collide with one another and diffuse, equally dispersing themselves throughout a given space.
Source => livescience.com

5. Ice-Blanket for Winter

Ever feel the ice-cracking pressure to float someone's boat? Well, water's gotcha covered: When frozen, H2O actually becomes less dense than its liquid form, allowing it to float, all thanks to hydrogen bonds keeping those oxygen atoms at bay. This nifty quirk enables bodies of water to freeze top-down, creating an icy blanket for underwater inhabitants to snuggle through those chilly winters.
Source => childrensmuseum.org

6. Zeus and Thor's Weapon

When Zeus and Thor get into a heated argument, plasma is their weapon of choice: This electrifying state of matter is not only found in the bolts of lightning they hurl but also in the magnificent polar auroras, fluorescent lights, and plasma TV screens. As if that wasn't enough, the vast majority of the universe, including our tan-loving sun and its stellar neighbors, consists of this charged concoction of ions that harmonize with both electricity and magnetism.
Source => learnbps.bismarckschools.org

7. Zen-like Particle Waves

In a world where particles get tired of the rat race and pursue a Zen-like state, they become a part of one big, happy wave family: it's the world of Bose-Einstein condensates, where ultra-low temperatures unite bosons in the lowest quantum state, allowing them to experience meddling wavefunction interference on a gigantic scale. These peculiar condensates were first predicted by Einstein and Bose in the 1920s, finally discovered in 1995, and have since then had research groups worldwide playing Cupid, bringing together various atomic species, molecules, quasi-particles, and photons in the name of science and curiosity.
Source => en.wikipedia.org

8. Pool-Party Molecules

Bouncing into a pool party like a beach ball, only to shrink down to the size of an inflatable duck as the temperature changes: that's the life of molecules in different states of matter! The serious reveal: When matter undergoes state changes, such as melting or vaporization, its density decreases, while the opposite happens during condensation or freezing, all due to the intermolecular distance between the molecules affecting their compactness and overall density.
Source => nagwa.com

9. Ancient Egypt's Gold Rush

Why did the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh go to therapy? He couldn't stop worshipping the "g(au)ld"en calf: In fact, Egyptian tombs, like Tutankhamen's, were chock-full of gold, featuring the largest collection of jewelry in the world. Gold was revered so much that it even influenced the Shekel currency used in the Middle East around 1500 BC, worth a whopping $500 today. Talk about a gold rush!
Source => metaltek.com

10. Atom Speakeasy

If atoms were a speakeasy, most of the place would be filled with invisible patrons: More than 99% of an atom is actually empty space! While the particles that make up atoms - like those elusive electrons, rowdy protons, and neutral neutrons - sound like a happening party, they only take up a minuscule part of an atom's volume.
Source => uen.pressbooks.pub

11. Gravity's Party Invitation

Why did the photon, gluon, and W/Z bosons form a club but not invite gravity? Because they didn't want to get too heavy! Okay, okay, we're kidding: In reality, the Standard Model of Particle Physics explains three of the four fundamental forces in the universe - electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force - all carried by said particles. However, it has yet to fully unravel the dark enigma of dark matter and dark energy, leaving gravity waiting for its elusive invitation.
Source => energy.gov

12. Telepathic Twins Particles

You know that couple that seems to share a single brain, finishing each other's sentences even when they're in different rooms? Well, the universe has one that's far more inseparable: Quantum entanglement allows two subatomic particles to stay intimately connected, even when separated by billions of light-years of space, meaning that whatever happens to one particle, the other gets the memo instantly, no matter the distance. They're like telepathic twins on steroids!
Source => space.com

13. Ghosting Dark Matter

Why did the non-baryonic matter keep ghosting the universe? Because it's a dark matter of the heart: Dark matter, comprising over 80% of all matter in existence, remains invisible and detectable only through gravitational effects, with speculations suggesting it to be made up of elusive weakly interacting massive particles or sterile neutrinos.
Source => space.com

14. Coolest Place in Space

Fancy freezing your extremities off in the coolest place in the cosmos: The Boomerang Nebula, a brisk 5,000 light years away in the constellation Centaurus, holds the record for the iciest temperature ever observed at just 1 Kelvin above absolute zero and boasts the slowest expanding celestial cloud in existence, puttering along at a leisurely 1 kilometer per second – ten times slower than its planetary nebula cousins!
Source => usatoday.com