Answer 1:
Your question brings up a lot of interesting
topics! Let's clear up some of the important
points first.
Light is made up of particles called
photons, that travel from a light source to other
objects to your eyes. Some examples of light
sources are the sun, light bulbs and fire. (But
your eyes are not a light source.) Photons
are very special particles: we say photons have
no rest mass, and you can think of them as energy,
not as matter.
Matter (objects, most stuff) is made up of
subatomic particles like electrons, neutrons and
protons. These particles all have mass--you
can weigh them. (Be careful not to confuse protons
and photons! Protons have mass, but photons
don't have mass.) In most objects, these
particles are already combined in a very specific
way that we call atoms. All atoms have a
core made up of protons and neutrons called the
nucleus. Meanwhile, electrons orbit around the
nucleus quickly.
Scientists are pretty good at changing the way
that atoms are combined with other atoms--this is
what chemical reactions do. But it's much harder
to change the way that subatomic particles combine
together (nuclear reactions). I know a couple
examples of places where scientists recombine
subatomic particles. In nuclear power plants,
we take large atoms like uranium and break them
apart to get energy that we can turn into
electrical energy. In particle accelerators
like the
Large Hadron Collider in Europe, physicists
put particles inside loops that are longer than 10
miles and race them along the tracks as fast as
they can, in opposite directions. Then they smash
them together and study the pieces that form or
break off.
So here are the challenges that I would face
if I wanted to try your request. First, the
amount of energy that I would need to start a
nuclear reaction is immense. The Large Hadron
Collider uses far more energy than any light bulbs
in our rooms, so we can't use regular light
bulbs as an energy source. Even a really
powerful light source like a laser might not be
enough to start a nuclear reaction. Plus, it
would not be safe to shine that laser into my
eyes--the energy would cause enough damage to my
eyes to make me go blind.
Next, I would need a way to control exactly
which subatomic particles I'm taking and exactly
where I'm putting them. A lot of scientists would
love to be able to move subatomic particles like
Lego blocks, but I don't think we have a way to
control them that could affect anything bigger
than a few atoms. Even if we solved all of these
challenges, you would probably need a strong
microscope just to see the wall you made. It turns
out that it's much faster and much cheaper to
get materials in conventional ways like
mining. Even the materials that they used to
build the Large Hadron Collider needed to be
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