Eli5 : If atoms are made of and separated by an incredible amount of empty space, why isn’t everything going through everything?
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While there is relatively enormous space between atomic nuclei, that space is a product of incredibly strong nuclear forces. These forces are essentially the electron cloud, while mostly empty space, there is still an incredible magnetic charge. The atoms tend to repel eachother because those clouds repel.
Essentially there may be space between nuclei, but because of those electron clouds, there exists a forcefield of sorts that prevents stuff from getting through.
Atoms are surrounded by ‘orbiting’ electrons. Indeed atomss are essentially empty space if the nucleus was the size of a ping pong ball the distance to the electrons ‘orbital’ position would be located a kilometre away. electrons exist in a kind of cloud surrounding the central nucleus. In a closed system Bohr’s model describing point like electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets orbiting the sun is incorrect as it would violate the conservation of energy due to the law of angular momentum. The reason why objects feel solid is because the electrons repel each other think of when you try to push two magnets together positive to positive and vice versa they repel each other through interaction of the electromagnetic field and the weak Force.
>If atoms are made of and separated by an incredible amount of empty space, why isn’t everything going through everything?
For one , **the space isn’t “empty”** exactly. It has a repulsive electromagnetic forcefield.
For two, **stuff IS going through everything**, all the time! 100 trillion neutrinos pass harmlessly through your body every second.
Given that quantum physicists can’t agree on just exactly how or why particles sometimes act as waves and sometimes as particles, I’d say the answer is that they don’t really have a good answer for that yet, other than “waves or particles of probability”, which sounds like a fancy way of saying that they still don’t know either.
The gap between the macro-world and the subatomic world is still a mystery that has not been fully solved. Anyone telling you differently is probably trying to get you to join a cult.
Partly because the atoms are sort of “tethered” together to produce various states of “solidity”, and partly because yes, it IS technically possible, it would just have to line up absolutely perfectly; the chances of this happening are so slim they might as well be zero, but it COULD technically, theoretically, in some bizarre circumstance actually happen
You know how you can’t touch the two same poles of magnets together? Go ahead, try it. Try pushing a south pole of one bar magnet to the south of another. haha. feel how they push each other apart so you can’t make them meet?
The material stuff of the world does that too. Your hand can’t go through a table, but it *can* go through water, because wayyy down at the smallest level, the building blocks of material are filled not just with “empty space” but with powerful forces. The way those forces behave gives materials all their characteristics, like feel and weight and strength and bounciness and every other thing.
Imagine you’re playing with two really strong magnets. You try to push the ends of the magnets that are the same (either both North ends or both South ends) together. Even though you’re not touching the magnets to each other, they still resist and push back against you. That’s because there’s a magnetic force field around them that you can’t see but can feel.
Atoms, the tiny particles that make up everything around us, behave kind of like these magnets. Each atom is made up of even smaller particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. The protons and neutrons hang out in the center, or nucleus, of the atom, and the electrons whizz around them in something like a cloud. Even though there’s a lot of empty space between the nucleus and the electrons, there’s an invisible force field, kind of like the magnets’ force field, around the atom. This is called the electromagnetic field.
Now, when two atoms get close to each other, their electromagnetic fields start to interact, just like the magnets’ fields. The electrons in one atom repel the electrons in the other atom. Even though there’s empty space in between, they can’t pass through each other because of this repulsion force, just like the magnets can’t be pushed together. This force is actually so strong that it makes up what we feel as solid objects!
So even though atoms have a lot of empty space in them, they feel solid and things don’t just pass through each other because of the invisible force fields that atoms have, just like the magnets. Pretty cool, huh?
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