I read somewhere that atoms never touch ( in a joke ) but how is this possible that we made of atoms and not touch ? But we touch each other and feel ?
In: Biology
We feel the forces between atoms. That’s pretty much it. Imagine you had two magnets that repelled each other. They aren’t touching, but if you held them you’d know the are interacting and can thus feel the other magnet through this force.
You aren’t actually touching anything. You’re feeling the forces between atoms as you bring them closer together but they are never actually touching.
“Touch” is somewhat subject to how you define it. At our level of things, we have the appearance of objects/etc coming into direct contact with one another with nothing in between. But, on the atomic level of things, you have to re-conceptualize nearly everything. How we think about our scale of the world doesn’t work anymore.
At the atomic level, the major forces at play are those between different particles. Some attract each other, some repel each other, and they often find sweet spots in between attraction and repelling. The thing is, atoms are *mostly* empty space, or simply, not occupied by the part that gives them “mass”. Instead, they are essentially a tiiiny positive/neutral core with a “shell” of negative charges floating around it, held apart but also nearby due by these comparatively extreme forces. Other atoms frequently interact with each other (their forces act on one another), without ever making “direct” contact, essentially–hence why, one might say they never “touch”.
Its like a Lego project. When you build something with Lego, there are tiny gaps inbetween each brick. But they’re all stuck together into a single project.
If we were the size of quarks (what neutrons & protons & electrons are made of) then we would see a HUGE gap in-between each atom. But since we are so much larger than individual atoms, it seems like there’s no gap at all.
The nucleus of atoms are surrounded by electrons, which are all negatively charged effectively making atoms miniature magnetic monopoles (magnet with only one side). So all atoms repel each other, when you touch something you’re really feeling the electrons in the atoms of your hand repelling the electrons of the atoms of the thing you’re touching. So nuclei never touch.
Touch is a relative/fuzzy concept at atomic scales.
(Note; this doesn’t include atoms reacting with one another where they form bonds and could by some definitions be considered touching).
There is a lot of nothing between atoms. If you place your hand on the table it could pass right through in the sense that no atoms would collide.
Source:
Atoms interact with each other through a few different fundamental physical forces. For the interaction that we usually think of as “touch”, the force involved is the electromagnetic force.
Atoms are surrounded by an electromagnetic force field. When the fields of two atoms are close enough to each other to interact they’re touching. The EM field is strong enough that the fields begin to interact at a larger distance than direct surface-to-surface contact of the atomic nuclei.
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