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
“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”.
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