So, we’re all made out of cells, right? And these cells are really super tiny, so why is it when we accidently cut ourselves, like a papercut or from glass, the sharp edge just doesn’t push the cells to the side?
Further, do those edges push aside out individual atoms too, or somehow have we just been avoiding death via splitting atoms?
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The way I understood it, when you cut yourself with a knife, the blade of the knife actually does just essentially push your cells aside and separate them. The reason this cuts you instead of your skin just deforming like a bean bag and then going back into shape is because:
Our cells have a sort of bonding to eachother, which makes skin a somewhat rigid surface which would make it easier to cut – for example – if you stuck a knife into a jar of sugar, it wouldn’t cut the sugar granules because the sugar granules are loose so the knife just pushes past the granules, whereas if you pressed down on a sugar cube with a knife, it would break the sugar cube or cut it because the sugar granules are bonded together so it’s a rigid structure meaning the knife can’t just push past them because it’s not loose.
And following on from this, yeah, the knife just for the most part delegates your skin cells and pushes them aside. The thing is, once they’re pushed aside from eachother, the cells can’t just instantly reattach to eachother, so they stay separated, and this is what the cut is. Then when the cut heals it repairs any damaged cells and essentially bonds/glues the cells back together.
About the atom splitting part, I might be wayyy off on this, I haven’t studied chemistry since highschool but here goes. The bonds that hold the nucleus together are incredibly strong, so strong that you with a knife are not strong enough to break them. To build on this, nuclear bombs actually require a conventional explosive inside the nuclear bomb to initially split the first atom – basically the conventional explosion rams one piece of nuclear material that’s shaped to be pointy, into another piece of nuclear material with such force that it splits the atom. Your arm obviously doesn’t have the force of an explosive, so you’re not going to accidentally split an atom because of how strong a nucleus is held together. Idk if im just repeating myself lol so sorry if I am.
remember that on an atomic scale, the surface area of a knife blade is like the width of a football field (side note that’s not actually an accurate scale, but in ELI5 terms the surface area if a knife blade is still absolutely massive on an atomic scale), and a single atoms nucleus is absolutely tiny.
And even if you did miraculously split an atom with a knife, I may be wrong on this but I don’t think you’d even notice anything happen. Atoms store a tremendous amount of energy **relative to their size**. The energy stored in a single atom, if released, you literally wouldn’t even notice I think. The reason nuclear bombs are so powerful is because it creates a chain reaction. It splits one atom, which splits another atom, which splits another atom, and then within a very very short space of time, gazillions of atoms have been split, all releasing their energy in that short space of time.
I don’t know how many atoms there are in the nuclear material parts of a nuclear bomb, but for reference isn’t it meant to be true that there’s more atoms in a tin can than there is grains of sand in the world? I mean…it’s not like they have counted every grain of sand, but you get the idea, there are a lot of atoms in something as small as a tin can. Now think about how many atoms there are inside a nuclear warhead. Whatever the number is, it has a lot of digits to it. That’s why a nuclear blast is so big and powerful, and why a singular atom being split and releasing its energy would be unnoticeably small and pathetic lol
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