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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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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