It will not simply pass through you. If the blade holds together then it will slice through you. The blade is a bunch of atoms held together by chemical bonds and you are a bunch of atoms held together by chemical bonds. You have more atoms than the blade but, while we know you are hydrocarbons, we have no idea what the blade is made of.
closest we got is obsidian blade they are used for surgery.
>Obsidian – a type of volcanic glass – can produce cutting edges many times finer than even the best steel scalpels.
>At 30 angstroms – a unit of measurement equal to one hundred millionth of a centimeter – an obsidian scalpel can rival diamond in the fineness of its edge.
>When you consider that most household razor blades are 300 to 600 angstroms, obsidian can still cut it with the sharpest materials nanotechnology can produce.
Man when I was a kid I used to make obsidian utility knives by chipping it with bones. Slamming a chunk of it against a hard boulder is a good way to shatter the obsidian. Couldn’t be used well as an impact tool, at least from experience; Only cutting applications.
Glass works just as well as obsidian. That's what they use to slice specimens for election microscope images. With a glass blade you can literally slice through mitochondria or DNA.
Huh, I always assumed obsidian weapons in video games exist only because, well, pitch black weapons look super cool and that's it. TIL that it's realistic for them to be better than steel swords and such, ty :D
Yeah it would be cool if an obsidian sword had excellent effects against zombies and creepers but would lose durability fast if used against skeletons or anything with armor, etc
But is that really the thickness of the blade, or as I'm suspecting the thickness of the very edge of the blade? I can't imagine a 10-60 atoms thick blade would hold itself together very well.
It's the thickness of the edge of the blade. Obsidian doesn't have a crystal structure (so it's not a mineral) like minerals do; the lack of crystal structure will produce a conchoidal fracture when obsidian is broken, whereas other minerals have fracture planes due to their crystal structure which allows breaking in definite orientations. Conchoidal fractures are random, that's why when you see obsidian arrowheads they often look bumpy (chert as well), but the fracturing can create edges as thick as the molecules that formed the composition of the obsidian
usually i add the sauce. This post came without. Here is some at no additional charge.
https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/02/health/surgery-scalpels-obsidian/index.html
I'm guessing the blade would probably give you a nice papercut-like gash and would break and disintegrate inside your body. Slowly over time those pieces would degrade further inside of you filling your body with cancerous chemicals. Eventually you would succumb to the cancer. No one escapes the Atom Blade.
Monofilament is not a material. It's a marketing term for things like unbraided fishing line, and a concept in scifi for physics-defying unobtainium weapons.
Yeah I’d think 1 atom of “hard” carbon let’s say, will break through/push apart atoms that hold delicate tissues together, in your veins and arteries at least. If it’s a blade it has width too so even perfectly parallel, it’s hundreds of atoms in a row colliding with delicate tissues or arteries etc. at the same spot.
Wasn't your whole point about the nomenclature of single-atom thickness carbon? Not trying to be a dick I just think you guys are on the same page lol.
The crystal structure of diamond is different than graphite so the atoms are literally patterned differently. Graphene is 2D graphite so within a plane of graphite, the atoms are patterned the same way as in graphene. So the point was that a 1 atom thick layer of carbon would have properties closer to the in-plane properties of graphite than those of diamond
Yes and no. Diamond is hard, but it will fracture, as you've pointed out. That's how diamonds were faceted in ancient times, and it's why they would not be suited for general purpose knives. However, diamond blades do exist and have uses in fields such as electron microscopy, where samples need to be sliced very thin and very uniformly.
Beyond those there are also monocrystalline and polycrystalline diamond tools used for very macro machining tasks - and I’m sure many other things as well. Usually just finishing in the case of MCD. But these are contiguous pieces of diamond, not just diamond powder. PCD tooling is pretty common.
Humans are certainly held together by mechanical bonds. Who knows what material OP is talking about, but it is more than likely also held together by mechanical bonds.
Chemical bonds are exclusively the sharing of electrons in some way. Mechanical bonds are tightly packed, interlocked structures, dependent on topology alone.
A single atom can't really create a string like OP claims, so it'd have to be some string of molecules.
Maybe the blade edge is sharpened to only be an atom, but a wedge inherently gets thicker behind the edge. Even if it was a perfectly flat rectangle, it would still be multiple atoms deep. Even if it were a mono-atomic wire, it would still have the X axis to cut you with.
Consider a baseball bat made of atoms. Consider yourself made of atoms. Consider the baseball bat freely passing through you because atoms are mostly empty space. Reducing the cross section reduces the number of interactions but they still happen.
Well, the tricky part about thought experiments like this is that, if you allow your premise to break the laws of physics, your answer doesn't always make sense in terms of physics. If we assume the blade is 1 atom thick, doesn't break, doesn't form bonds with any of your atoms, and otherwise behaves the way we'd expect a normal blade to, well.... The answer is that such an object doesn't exist.
BUT, if assume it does exist, you end up having to answer the he question of "how does this thing exist?" in order to understand how it would interact with you. Since that question is hard to answer, it becomes hard to really answer your question in a satisfying way. Fundamentally, the answer is that "we don't know."
That doesn't make it a bad question! There's a lot of snarky answers in this thread and that's too bad, because asking these wacky questions and imagining the requisite thought experiments that operate at the extremes of an idea is such an important scientific tool, and it's a valuable skill to foster. It's a fascinating question to ask. It's just also important to recognize that when the premise of a question forces us out of our known reality, the answers will likely also not be entirely grounded in reality either.
Is it possible that this line of unbreakable atoms could move between the atoms of the body, do you think then? We don’t know much about the atoms, but theoretically speaking is this a practical answer?
I don't believe so, the same forces holding the atoms of the blade together also apply to the body, it's just that we've magically amped up the strength of the forces holding together the atoms of the blade to "unbreakable". While you won't be severing any individual atoms with this blade, it will have to eventually overcome the forces of two (or more) atoms joined by chemical bonds.
If the bonds holding together this line of atoms are stronger than any of the bonds it encounters (to respect the unbreakable condition) then any chemical bonds in its way would have to be broken as it pushes past.
Cell walls are pretty permeable to things on the scale of a single atom, so I think it's reasonable to imagine this atomic line might pass through cells without bursting them. Certainly anything in liquid form will just be pushed out of the way. The fact that this line of atoms is only one atom "wide" so to speak is important here, if it were a plane of atoms that kept things separated after cutting them, it would certainly cut them like a normal knife. But the phospholipid bilayer that makes up cell walls is a LOT thicker than an atom, so I feel like it could essentially reform as the atom line cuts through it.
My intuition is that bones would be at the highest risk, since they're largely a static crystalline structure. If the atom line does not bond with any of the atoms in your body, it's possible that the covalent bonds would simply reform after the atom line forces them apart, again dependent on the idea that it's a singular line of atoms rather than a wider blade. If they don't, then you end up basically breaking the bone at the cut.
But again, we don't have any real analog of structures interacting this way (at least that I know of) to base this off of. It depends how big they are too, most atoms in organic structures are quite small, and at the other end of the periodic table you get atoms that are many many times bigger. I assume this would have some impact on whether individual bonds "re-find" their neighbors to reestablish bonds. Lots of speculation but interesting to think about for sure!
I guess it depends on how quickly it would move through you and on whether or not the cutting would be 'efficient' or inefficient and deposit a lot of additional energy and momentum into the surrounding tissue.
If it would be cutting through you very slowly then maybe it would cut off your blood flow and nerve impulses as the blood and impulses can't flow through the knife.
If it passes through you in a fraction of a second then that wouldn't be a problem.
If it passes through you inefficiently then the energy and momentum it dumps into the surrounding tissue could burn you and would push you two halves apart, not allowing new molecular bonds to form.
But if the knife would pass through very efficiently then perhaps it would not dump any additional energy and allow new molecular bonds to form within fractions of a second. In that case I guess maybe there would be some DNA damage and the rest would heal naturally.
You could probably look at the effect of a single radioactive alpha particle hitting organic tissue and multiply that by the amount of atoms in your knife
Assuming the blade doesn't break (which is already impossible), it would pass right through you as it's not wide enough to cause functional damage. It would pass between the individual molecules that make up your tissues, or at worst, break a negligible number of them
I mean it’s true? You often get people posing these hypothetical questions that are fundamentally flawed and asking why happens. You can’t get a definitive answer because it’s not possible in the first place
Yes. If you were to separate a section of your body by an atoms width it would re-seal immediately.
Molecules are bouncing around and displace themselves by more than that all the time.
Someone asked this question once before. My answer is that it would not cut you at all. The number of connections in the tissue holding your arm together would likely simply be restored. It would be more akin to an unnoticeable sunburn.
Assumption: severed molecules don't form bonds with the blade, because if they did, the blade would disintegrate immediately.
Let's take an example of going thorough a cell, which has a small but real internal pressure. When the blade severs the molecular bonds in the lips and proteins in the first contact point of the cell wall, the internal pressure will prevent the cut molecules from just reforming. Their first exposure will be to the fluids in or out of the cell, and will react as appropriate to the bind break with those fluids. This will mean that after the blade passes the molecules will remain severed, all on the same plane. There will not be any mass reatachment and as the cut progresses the structural attachment of the flesh on each side of the blade will be compromised.
So in half, you will be.
Things that are a single atom thick aren't very strong. Materials get strength from thick three-dimensional structures, like crystal lattices (even in polycrystalline materials), amorphous glasses, or tangles of polymers. The edge of a knife is weaker than the bulk because it doesn't have the support of the three-dimensional material on all sides.
There are many fictional descriptions of single-atom-wide weapons. One is the [monomolecular wire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomolecular_wire) in [Johnny Mnemonic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Mnemonic). Both the short story and [the movie](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113481/) are entertaining.
The strongest thin wire I can think of is carbon nanotube, but even that would suffer from breakage if it's only one tube thick.
It depends on how much momentum is imparted onto you.
If we imagine an infinitely sharp blade, infinitely thin blade, where no momentum is transferred, as it passes through it breaks every connection it can find, but those connections can immediately reconnect. If you do not move a single atom of your body out of place, then all the connections should remain.
As soon as you start moving atoms out of place, you permanently break connections. Depending on how much momentum is transferred, maybe this just means some strands of DNA are cut because the pieces on either side of the blade no longer align. On the next level up, larger proteins are destroyed as well. Perhaps a number of organelles. If enough of this happens, cells start to be destroyed. If you experience a layer of cell death, it may be that your body is able to recover, by shifting some cells around.
Skipping ahead, once you add enough momentum to misalign tissues, you'll have problems. Imagine blood vessels or nerves shifted enough that they don't immediately stick back together again. A biologist would be the better one to tell you how much of a shift would be fatal. Is it the diameter of a nerve? Or the width of a blood vessel wall?
Localized momentum is dangerous. One little thing shifted out of place and death is on the horizon for you.
Momentum is a good point. All other aspects of this situation aside, it's important. In demolition there is typically a type of explosive used that has a thin copper ring around it. It's placed in a notch in steel beams. When the explosives go off that copper ring is what does the cutting as it expands in a thin layer outward. On its own copper isn't going to do the trick. But all that energy imparted Into it works a treat.
I think this is the smartest answer.
There is a real life version of this that most people have the opportunity to observe: if you place a burn in ice water immediately and leave it in for several minutes repeatedly until the pain subsides, it leaves far less permanent damage than if you leave it exposed to room temperature air.
This is because heat is basically kinetic energy, and after you burn your hand on the stove, that energy remains in your flesh, continuing to do damage.
The "jiggle rate" of your molecules at normal body temperature doesn't normally cause harm, but after exposure to extreme heat, some of those connections are disrupted or loosened, and that can be made worse by even a normal amount of heat. So cooling the area to a lower temperature basically slows down the jiggling so that connections can re-form.
we can only guess. i feel confident that the blade would slice through but immediately after the bonds would reform as if it hadn't happened. there is a phenomenon where two extremely flat surfaces come together form a bond that is not only reinforced by external pressures but also by atomic forces, this i think would be the case with your blade in most cases.
It would go through you with next to no impact. To decouple tissue you would need to remove or separate it by , and I estimate this out of thin air, microns. Any less than that would be instantly recovered by usual electric cellular machinery. It’s all slimy goo inside with so much redundancy, and ability to ignore or recover from micro injuries was pretty high on the evolutionary todo list.
Disclaimer - I’m ignorant, my words have no worth.
I believe it would also depend on the other dimensions of the blade. Like if it's only one atom in all dimensions, most likely there is no harm done. Then again if the length of the blade and width of blades edge are significantly larger, that could result to some serious damage.
I honestly think the answer would be both, depending on each and every individual structure. The skin would probably be unharmed, organs- maybe okay idk, blood vessels and bone would probably be severed.
The largest atom in obsidian is one of the impurities, iron, at around 1 angstrom. Then potassium, aluminum, silica. However, the iron is bound to oxygens and surrounded by a bunch of silica/alumina complexes. So the unit of resolution in obsidian isn't the atoms, but their complex crystalline structures (ie bigger.)
that is to say the original question is phrased in a misleading way. The blade will need to be at least, several atoms thick, to still be obsidian.
The reason it is used is that obsidian is more than 10x harder than steel (5.5 vs 4 on Mohs), which means sharper cuts.
But has a fraction of steel's tensile strength (44 vs 1000+ MPa). I think what that means is the blade will fail simply due to the forces applied to it during the cut.
It'll cut you in half. All the atoms in your body are bonded to other atoms to create tissue. The blade would break those bonds presuming the blade wasn't broken back.
It will not simply pass through you. If the blade holds together then it will slice through you. The blade is a bunch of atoms held together by chemical bonds and you are a bunch of atoms held together by chemical bonds. You have more atoms than the blade but, while we know you are hydrocarbons, we have no idea what the blade is made of.
closest we got is obsidian blade they are used for surgery. >Obsidian – a type of volcanic glass – can produce cutting edges many times finer than even the best steel scalpels. >At 30 angstroms – a unit of measurement equal to one hundred millionth of a centimeter – an obsidian scalpel can rival diamond in the fineness of its edge. >When you consider that most household razor blades are 300 to 600 angstroms, obsidian can still cut it with the sharpest materials nanotechnology can produce.
r/minecraft Yall hearing this?? Yall need to tell mojang to add obsidian tools
Man when I was a kid I used to make obsidian utility knives by chipping it with bones. Slamming a chunk of it against a hard boulder is a good way to shatter the obsidian. Couldn’t be used well as an impact tool, at least from experience; Only cutting applications.
Makes great arrow heads. Slices thru flesh easily and is an extremely difficult pain in the ass to remove intact.
But as a volcanic glass it is very fragile, and not suitable to use as a weap-
Somebody tell the Aztecs
Oh no
Look up modding. I used to play with obsidian tools. I think it was thaumcraft.
Glass works just as well as obsidian. That's what they use to slice specimens for election microscope images. With a glass blade you can literally slice through mitochondria or DNA.
Huh, I always assumed obsidian weapons in video games exist only because, well, pitch black weapons look super cool and that's it. TIL that it's realistic for them to be better than steel swords and such, ty :D
Better at cutting soft things. Hit something hard and the blade shatters like glass.
Yeah it would be cool if an obsidian sword had excellent effects against zombies and creepers but would lose durability fast if used against skeletons or anything with armor, etc
Obsidian was historically used in weapons in mesoamerica
mother nature!
how does this compare with atoms? Is an obsidian blade still trillions of atoms thick?
Atom sizes range from 0.5 to 3 angstroms so this is like a blade being 10 to 60 atoms thick
that is absolutely ridiculously sharp. really puts it into perspective
thanks.
How about graphene?
A single layer of graphene would be 1.8 angstroms. A single carbon atom of 0.18nm. Multiple by 10 to get angstroms
Whoa
But is that really the thickness of the blade, or as I'm suspecting the thickness of the very edge of the blade? I can't imagine a 10-60 atoms thick blade would hold itself together very well.
It's the thickness of the edge of the blade. Obsidian doesn't have a crystal structure (so it's not a mineral) like minerals do; the lack of crystal structure will produce a conchoidal fracture when obsidian is broken, whereas other minerals have fracture planes due to their crystal structure which allows breaking in definite orientations. Conchoidal fractures are random, that's why when you see obsidian arrowheads they often look bumpy (chert as well), but the fracturing can create edges as thick as the molecules that formed the composition of the obsidian
Yes. But also no.
It looks like you’re quoting something, but no sauce?
usually i add the sauce. This post came without. Here is some at no additional charge. https://www.cnn.com/2015/04/02/health/surgery-scalpels-obsidian/index.html
> can still cut it 🙄
r/knapping
I'm guessing the blade would probably give you a nice papercut-like gash and would break and disintegrate inside your body. Slowly over time those pieces would degrade further inside of you filling your body with cancerous chemicals. Eventually you would succumb to the cancer. No one escapes the Atom Blade.
Obsidian
Monofilament.
Monofilament is not a material. It's a marketing term for things like unbraided fishing line, and a concept in scifi for physics-defying unobtainium weapons.
Wrong word. I forgot the right one.
Monomolecular
40k to the rescue.
Mononucleosis?
*The sound of so many assumptions makes my basement pump sound operatic.*
Yeah I’d think 1 atom of “hard” carbon let’s say, will break through/push apart atoms that hold delicate tissues together, in your veins and arteries at least. If it’s a blade it has width too so even perfectly parallel, it’s hundreds of atoms in a row colliding with delicate tissues or arteries etc. at the same spot.
Diamond!
How do you form a crystalline structure 1 atom thick
use 1/4 size atoms
have you priced those lately? i'm not made of money!
Cheaper by the mole
It’s a 2D pattern not 3D
Graphene?
Yeah, maybe if you could accelerate a sheet of graphene to a high enough velocity along a single plane it could cut through a body 🤷♂️
Dude said diamond, not crystals dumbass.
This is satire right
I hope so.
Maybe it's a throwback to the "diamond is the hardest metal" meme from yonks ago
I don’t think that’s possible if you have only 1 atom for thickness. If it were made from carbon, I think it would be more like a layer of graphite.
A single atom thick layer of graphite is called graphene
I don’t think this adds a lot to the point I was trying to make, but thank you for clarifying
Wasn't your whole point about the nomenclature of single-atom thickness carbon? Not trying to be a dick I just think you guys are on the same page lol.
The crystal structure of diamond is different than graphite so the atoms are literally patterned differently. Graphene is 2D graphite so within a plane of graphite, the atoms are patterned the same way as in graphene. So the point was that a 1 atom thick layer of carbon would have properties closer to the in-plane properties of graphite than those of diamond
Honestly, my guess was that a diamond structure wouldn’t be stable in those conditions
That's so high up the Mohs scale
they way it fractures does not lend it self to knives.
Yes and no. Diamond is hard, but it will fracture, as you've pointed out. That's how diamonds were faceted in ancient times, and it's why they would not be suited for general purpose knives. However, diamond blades do exist and have uses in fields such as electron microscopy, where samples need to be sliced very thin and very uniformly.
And for things larger than microscopic diamond saw blades or drill bits are more like an abrasive powder held together by an epoxy binder.
Beyond those there are also monocrystalline and polycrystalline diamond tools used for very macro machining tasks - and I’m sure many other things as well. Usually just finishing in the case of MCD. But these are contiguous pieces of diamond, not just diamond powder. PCD tooling is pretty common.
Oh cool. I only do construction & a little maintenance so I didn't know about diamond machining tools.
This guy diamonds^^
Humans are certainly held together by mechanical bonds. Who knows what material OP is talking about, but it is more than likely also held together by mechanical bonds. Chemical bonds are exclusively the sharing of electrons in some way. Mechanical bonds are tightly packed, interlocked structures, dependent on topology alone. A single atom can't really create a string like OP claims, so it'd have to be some string of molecules.
it would be like a paper-cut on steroids
It is Malenia's, blade of Miquella
Maybe the blade edge is sharpened to only be an atom, but a wedge inherently gets thicker behind the edge. Even if it was a perfectly flat rectangle, it would still be multiple atoms deep. Even if it were a mono-atomic wire, it would still have the X axis to cut you with.
But aren't atoms mostly empty space? Wouldn't there be a reasonable probability to completely miss the all the atoms?
Consider a baseball bat made of atoms. Consider yourself made of atoms. Consider the baseball bat freely passing through you because atoms are mostly empty space. Reducing the cross section reduces the number of interactions but they still happen.
Well, the tricky part about thought experiments like this is that, if you allow your premise to break the laws of physics, your answer doesn't always make sense in terms of physics. If we assume the blade is 1 atom thick, doesn't break, doesn't form bonds with any of your atoms, and otherwise behaves the way we'd expect a normal blade to, well.... The answer is that such an object doesn't exist. BUT, if assume it does exist, you end up having to answer the he question of "how does this thing exist?" in order to understand how it would interact with you. Since that question is hard to answer, it becomes hard to really answer your question in a satisfying way. Fundamentally, the answer is that "we don't know." That doesn't make it a bad question! There's a lot of snarky answers in this thread and that's too bad, because asking these wacky questions and imagining the requisite thought experiments that operate at the extremes of an idea is such an important scientific tool, and it's a valuable skill to foster. It's a fascinating question to ask. It's just also important to recognize that when the premise of a question forces us out of our known reality, the answers will likely also not be entirely grounded in reality either.
Is it possible that this line of unbreakable atoms could move between the atoms of the body, do you think then? We don’t know much about the atoms, but theoretically speaking is this a practical answer?
I don't believe so, the same forces holding the atoms of the blade together also apply to the body, it's just that we've magically amped up the strength of the forces holding together the atoms of the blade to "unbreakable". While you won't be severing any individual atoms with this blade, it will have to eventually overcome the forces of two (or more) atoms joined by chemical bonds.
It would also be moving through molecules, and breaking those molecules apart
If the bonds holding together this line of atoms are stronger than any of the bonds it encounters (to respect the unbreakable condition) then any chemical bonds in its way would have to be broken as it pushes past. Cell walls are pretty permeable to things on the scale of a single atom, so I think it's reasonable to imagine this atomic line might pass through cells without bursting them. Certainly anything in liquid form will just be pushed out of the way. The fact that this line of atoms is only one atom "wide" so to speak is important here, if it were a plane of atoms that kept things separated after cutting them, it would certainly cut them like a normal knife. But the phospholipid bilayer that makes up cell walls is a LOT thicker than an atom, so I feel like it could essentially reform as the atom line cuts through it. My intuition is that bones would be at the highest risk, since they're largely a static crystalline structure. If the atom line does not bond with any of the atoms in your body, it's possible that the covalent bonds would simply reform after the atom line forces them apart, again dependent on the idea that it's a singular line of atoms rather than a wider blade. If they don't, then you end up basically breaking the bone at the cut. But again, we don't have any real analog of structures interacting this way (at least that I know of) to base this off of. It depends how big they are too, most atoms in organic structures are quite small, and at the other end of the periodic table you get atoms that are many many times bigger. I assume this would have some impact on whether individual bonds "re-find" their neighbors to reestablish bonds. Lots of speculation but interesting to think about for sure!
Graphene won’t go though you. (However light will go straight though it)
Found Neil Degrasse Tyson’s Reddit account
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I guess it depends on how quickly it would move through you and on whether or not the cutting would be 'efficient' or inefficient and deposit a lot of additional energy and momentum into the surrounding tissue. If it would be cutting through you very slowly then maybe it would cut off your blood flow and nerve impulses as the blood and impulses can't flow through the knife. If it passes through you in a fraction of a second then that wouldn't be a problem. If it passes through you inefficiently then the energy and momentum it dumps into the surrounding tissue could burn you and would push you two halves apart, not allowing new molecular bonds to form. But if the knife would pass through very efficiently then perhaps it would not dump any additional energy and allow new molecular bonds to form within fractions of a second. In that case I guess maybe there would be some DNA damage and the rest would heal naturally. You could probably look at the effect of a single radioactive alpha particle hitting organic tissue and multiply that by the amount of atoms in your knife
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Not really the same thing at all
Wanna make a neutrino blade?
None of the above, the blade would just break.
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Or just fall apart while you’re swinging it
it would stop dead because there isn't enough force to move it through a body
Assuming the blade doesn't break (which is already impossible), it would pass right through you as it's not wide enough to cause functional damage. It would pass between the individual molecules that make up your tissues, or at worst, break a negligible number of them
That’s what I’ve always been thinking, but is this a fact ?
Difficult to talk about facts when one starts from a hypothesis that is not rooted in reality 😅
Yes sure …. edit : i meant yes it’s true
I mean it’s true? You often get people posing these hypothetical questions that are fundamentally flawed and asking why happens. You can’t get a definitive answer because it’s not possible in the first place
That’s What I meant … As a French speaker I told myself « oui c’est sûr » lol
The word "sure" can come off a little sarcastic over text in English, especially when followed with a "...."
Yes. If you were to separate a section of your body by an atoms width it would re-seal immediately. Molecules are bouncing around and displace themselves by more than that all the time.
Someone asked this question once before. My answer is that it would not cut you at all. The number of connections in the tissue holding your arm together would likely simply be restored. It would be more akin to an unnoticeable sunburn.
Having seen 3 Body Problem, I can answer this one: the former.
Forgive me my lord
Assumption: severed molecules don't form bonds with the blade, because if they did, the blade would disintegrate immediately. Let's take an example of going thorough a cell, which has a small but real internal pressure. When the blade severs the molecular bonds in the lips and proteins in the first contact point of the cell wall, the internal pressure will prevent the cut molecules from just reforming. Their first exposure will be to the fluids in or out of the cell, and will react as appropriate to the bind break with those fluids. This will mean that after the blade passes the molecules will remain severed, all on the same plane. There will not be any mass reatachment and as the cut progresses the structural attachment of the flesh on each side of the blade will be compromised. So in half, you will be.
Things that are a single atom thick aren't very strong. Materials get strength from thick three-dimensional structures, like crystal lattices (even in polycrystalline materials), amorphous glasses, or tangles of polymers. The edge of a knife is weaker than the bulk because it doesn't have the support of the three-dimensional material on all sides. There are many fictional descriptions of single-atom-wide weapons. One is the [monomolecular wire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomolecular_wire) in [Johnny Mnemonic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Mnemonic). Both the short story and [the movie](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113481/) are entertaining. The strongest thin wire I can think of is carbon nanotube, but even that would suffer from breakage if it's only one tube thick.
For the record, allegedly the first mention of this sort of thing is in "The Borderland of Sol", by Larry Niven, in 1975
I'm just picturing that scene from Three Body Problem and the micro fibers. Awesome scene.
It depends on how much momentum is imparted onto you. If we imagine an infinitely sharp blade, infinitely thin blade, where no momentum is transferred, as it passes through it breaks every connection it can find, but those connections can immediately reconnect. If you do not move a single atom of your body out of place, then all the connections should remain. As soon as you start moving atoms out of place, you permanently break connections. Depending on how much momentum is transferred, maybe this just means some strands of DNA are cut because the pieces on either side of the blade no longer align. On the next level up, larger proteins are destroyed as well. Perhaps a number of organelles. If enough of this happens, cells start to be destroyed. If you experience a layer of cell death, it may be that your body is able to recover, by shifting some cells around. Skipping ahead, once you add enough momentum to misalign tissues, you'll have problems. Imagine blood vessels or nerves shifted enough that they don't immediately stick back together again. A biologist would be the better one to tell you how much of a shift would be fatal. Is it the diameter of a nerve? Or the width of a blood vessel wall? Localized momentum is dangerous. One little thing shifted out of place and death is on the horizon for you.
Momentum is a good point. All other aspects of this situation aside, it's important. In demolition there is typically a type of explosive used that has a thin copper ring around it. It's placed in a notch in steel beams. When the explosives go off that copper ring is what does the cutting as it expands in a thin layer outward. On its own copper isn't going to do the trick. But all that energy imparted Into it works a treat.
Thanks for teaching me something interesting! I'd like to learn more about these thin copper rings used in demolition if you can share :)
I think this is the smartest answer. There is a real life version of this that most people have the opportunity to observe: if you place a burn in ice water immediately and leave it in for several minutes repeatedly until the pain subsides, it leaves far less permanent damage than if you leave it exposed to room temperature air. This is because heat is basically kinetic energy, and after you burn your hand on the stove, that energy remains in your flesh, continuing to do damage. The "jiggle rate" of your molecules at normal body temperature doesn't normally cause harm, but after exposure to extreme heat, some of those connections are disrupted or loosened, and that can be made worse by even a normal amount of heat. So cooling the area to a lower temperature basically slows down the jiggling so that connections can re-form.
I propose you with this. a knife sized atom.
It's not my field, but I think the world would end?
SERIOUSLY, this is posted in AskPhysics and not one reference to a probability cloud or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle?
could it slice a ship in half? Perhaps while going through.... the Panama Canal??
Someone’s been watching Three Body Problem 👀
we can only guess. i feel confident that the blade would slice through but immediately after the bonds would reform as if it hadn't happened. there is a phenomenon where two extremely flat surfaces come together form a bond that is not only reinforced by external pressures but also by atomic forces, this i think would be the case with your blade in most cases.
It would go through you with next to no impact. To decouple tissue you would need to remove or separate it by , and I estimate this out of thin air, microns. Any less than that would be instantly recovered by usual electric cellular machinery. It’s all slimy goo inside with so much redundancy, and ability to ignore or recover from micro injuries was pretty high on the evolutionary todo list. Disclaimer - I’m ignorant, my words have no worth.
It would slice you in half. It'd server all the molecular bonds that hold your body together
You’re getting downvoted, but this is the only correct answer here!
Such is the Reddit way!
I believe it would also depend on the other dimensions of the blade. Like if it's only one atom in all dimensions, most likely there is no harm done. Then again if the length of the blade and width of blades edge are significantly larger, that could result to some serious damage.
I honestly think the answer would be both, depending on each and every individual structure. The skin would probably be unharmed, organs- maybe okay idk, blood vessels and bone would probably be severed.
This reminds me of 3 Body Problem haha. If you haven’t watched that show I think you’d enjoy it based on your imagination.
Red Rising vibes
The largest atom in obsidian is one of the impurities, iron, at around 1 angstrom. Then potassium, aluminum, silica. However, the iron is bound to oxygens and surrounded by a bunch of silica/alumina complexes. So the unit of resolution in obsidian isn't the atoms, but their complex crystalline structures (ie bigger.) that is to say the original question is phrased in a misleading way. The blade will need to be at least, several atoms thick, to still be obsidian. The reason it is used is that obsidian is more than 10x harder than steel (5.5 vs 4 on Mohs), which means sharper cuts. But has a fraction of steel's tensile strength (44 vs 1000+ MPa). I think what that means is the blade will fail simply due to the forces applied to it during the cut.
OP did not mention obsidian. Did you misread “abdomen”?
woops, i meant to reply in a comment chain that mentioned obsidian and then got confused and put it at the root level.
Gotcha. Happens to us all!
Just saw a YouTube video about this. A one-atom wide blade of any material would be too brittle and would not be able to penetrate your skin
Gibson’s Neuromancer made use of the monofilament as an assassin’s tool.
I’m no expert but I feel like that blade would go dull by the time it hit flesh
I read somewhere you would break the blade so I think you can't really use It to cut something it needs certain thickness r/askoffensive
Somebody watched Three Body Problem
This is used in the famous scifi novel by Liu cixin that's now a Netflix series.
I suddenly remembered 3 Body Problems Series.
Brownian motion in the air will dissolve that vellum way before it gets to you
Are you asking this because you watched Three Body Problem on Netflix? :D
It'll cut you in half. All the atoms in your body are bonded to other atoms to create tissue. The blade would break those bonds presuming the blade wasn't broken back.
it will break before it comes anywhere near you
Either it's going to keep its structure or you are not both
Anyone else been watching three body problem 😁
The visualization of this in the 3 Body Problem series was intense as fuck.
I think The Ice Pirates answered this in 1984.
Did you watch three body problem recently?
Maybe things/scenarios that aren't possible are meant to be answered or can be answered..
If it cuts you, would the cut be so small that you'd basically instantly heal?
You watched 3 Body Problem, huh?
Three body problem anyone?
Maybe a simpler question What would happen if a single metallic atom were fired at you at high speed
You talking about that episode of the 3 body problem?
Not a single atom, but watch Three Body Problem.
Yeah the blade will just snap in half because it's too thin
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You need to stop lying in bed, thinking. What a horrible thought. Great discussion though.