Same deal with the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th heaviest fundamental particles in the Universe: the Higgs Boson, the Z-boson, and - if you can overcome their charges - even the W-bosons. It didn't have to be that way! You can take photons - particles of light - and put an infinitely large number of them in an arbitrarily small space.

And it isn't just me I can't take any particle that makes up matter - a molecule, an atom, even a proton, neutron, or electron - and put an arbitrarily large number of them in a finite amount of space. No matter how hard I try, I can't be in the same place at the same time as any other object in the Universe. You can even build one for yourself using (just like on Monday) a 2-liter bottle.īut why is this? Why - at a fundamental level - does air, or matter of any type, have to take up space at all?Īnother way of asking this same question is, 'why can't more than one object be in the same place at the same time?' What prevents it from falling? It's got to be the air beneath the holes, exerting a pressure and taking up space! But place your thumb or hand over the top, and the water will stop flowing out of the bottom. If you lift the gourd up, the water leaks out of the bottom. You plunge the gourd into a stream, lake or river, and it fills with water. We've known this since Empedocles, in the 5 th Century B.C., who had a clepsydra - a hollow gourd with many holes in the bottom and a single hole at the top - demonstrated it. Not just wind, but still, stationary air takes up space. Matter - everything you know, love, hate, see, taste, and feel - takes up space.Įven air must take up space. 'A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.' - Tennessee Williams

Does expandrive take up space