If we’re made entirely of atoms and atoms never touch how do we feel different textures/fabrics
In: Physics
Well the confusion here comes at definitions, for example what exactly is to “touch something”? if you see what happens at the atomic level is that the electrons around the atoms repel each other and that force of repulsion is what you feel as “touching” something. so atoms do touch each other you just didn’t really knew what touching actually was.
The notion of things being a continuous solid is just an illusion caused by the scale at which we exist.
You are feeling the structures of the atoms like you touch steel you feel it’s hard and your feeling the crystalline structure and if you touch you shirt your feeling the soft composition of whatever makes up the fabric of your shirt. back to steel take a carbon steel for example you have your iron atoms that compose most of it but when you add carbon it tends to adhere itself in between the iron atoms to the make it harder also any of you knowing more than me please correct me
“Never touch” is sort of a misnomer.
If we zoom in enough, atoms aren’t like billiard balls. They’re more like clouds that, while more concentrated in some areas, diffuse smoothly out with no sharp edge. So “touch” isn’t really a well-defined idea at that level – in some sense, every atom in your body is “a little bit” everywhere in the universe, although “a little bit” here is so little that it is zero for all intents and purposes.
We don’t actually need to zoom in quite that much to talk about touch, though, because even if the electrons in the atoms of your hand *were* billiard balls, they still create an electric field around them because they carry electric charge. When another object with the same electric charge gets close (say, the electrons in the atoms of your desk), it’s repelled because two of the same type of charge push one another away.
For a more macroscopic version of this, take two magnets. If you glue Magnet A to your table, and then hold Magnet B, you can “feel” Magnet A by moving Magnet B around even if they don’t come into direct contact. While magnetic fields and electric fields behave somewhat differently (in a sense they’re two pieces of one underlying thing), this should at least give you a sense of how you can feel a thing without making direct contact with it.
Atoms ‘touch’ by electromagnetic forces. They don’t literally directly come next to each other and rub against each other, but that’s what touching is.
The particles that can be found at the outside of each atom are negatively charged. Much like when you push two north poles of a magnet together, the negatively charged exteriors of atoms resist being made to contact each other. When you touch something, you’re actually feeling the (electro)magnetic force of billions of atoms that they emit to resist touching, so you’re not really touching anything at all at an atomic level.
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