**Ask a monkey a physics question thread**

[MadMojoMonkey]

Thanks for the replies, sorry took a while to comment. Yeah that's some weird stuff, I'm not sure I'm any closer to intuitive understanding of torque.

You just gotta keep on it. It's a classical phenomenon (unlike QM and GR), so as a general rule it will eventually be intuitive to you if you keep thinking about it.

Another, completely unrelated, thing. Ever since years ago watching some documentary about the scale of atoms, the relative distance between electrons and the nuclei, I've been wondering about this but never been able to find any explanation that I could understand.

Well, let's see...

If you exert enough outside pressure to the electrons to squeeze them into the nucleus you're breaking the electron degenerative pressure, and if you have enough mass together in practise this is what happens when a star collapses into a white dwarf, right?

Yes, that's right. Except "into the nucleus" is terribly misleading. Electrons already spend time inside the nucleus, just not much on average.

The degeneracy pressure is a consequence of squeezing electrons close to each other, not to a nucleus.

If then you keep applying more force, enough to force the electrons and protons to combine and create neutrons (the Chandrasekhar limit?), you're left with a neutron star?

Yes.

Be cautioned against thinking that a neutron is somehow a proton and an electron stuck together. That's not the case. The electron is annihilated in the process of changing the proton into a neutron. They aren't really "combined" in that sense.

Still not satisfied, you keep exerting more force (and adding mass) to collapse the neutrons (the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit?) you end up with a black hole or something silly like a quark star?

Yes again... but this one isn't really a question, now, is it?