My son asked me this today, and while I thought that I had a sorta kinda basic idea (the cores don’t need to touch as it’s enough if the the electron cloud-thingies interact), I could not explain it so he could understand and neither was I sure enough of this being the correct answer. Can anyone help?
In: 6
Technically it doesn’t touch. Whilst we see and here it ‘touch’, it’s still separated at that sub-atomic level by those opposing forces.
Just explain it to him that if you had a strong enough microscope (I don’t think one exists yet) you’d be able to see the gaps, and it’s actually the forces of these particles that hold things apart – similar to two magnets with the same pole.
“Touching” is not really a concept that works at very small scapes.
Atoms do not interact by touch, but by exerting forces. Forces do not necessarily need things to be in contact to be transmitted – think for example of gravity, which acts across vast reaches of empty space.
One difference between gravity and those inter-atomic forces is that the latter only have very limited range. Thats why things have to be extremely close together to push against each other, which is what we call “touching”.
Most everything is empty space but there’s that many molecules (building blocks) in even the simplest of matter (things) that we see it as whole…. You can show a zoomed in picture of a crowed and scroll way out to illustrate this. When zoomed in the people are clearly not touching, or at least not every part of each other, but when zoomed at out… well you get it
As ELIF as I can get
Maybe if you think of a 3D cube made of netting where each and every crossing is a repelling magnet. This would push on every neighbor magnet and none of them would therefor touch, ever. Between all these magnets is there nothing, except the strings (made of the strong force).
If you now try to place another 3D cube on top of the first one, would they both repel each other and never touch, even that the top most, don’t fall through the lower one.
Balance. There are forces that pull stuff together (example gravity) and forces that can push apart (example magnetism). There’s an *evolving balance* that’s stood for 13B years. It’s not 100% proven to be stable or unstable. Current theory is that it’s still expanding at an accelerating rate. Which means that the universe might last for muuuuuch muuuch longer.
We know a lot about how to *work with* a lot of these forces: utility electricity, combustion engines, flight, bungee jumps. But, to completely define/’prove’ them is still the debate. If we *could* understand it all we’d have FTL and home fusion reactors right now. New factoid, a (Scandinavian) country reports 5 seconds of stable fusion reaction. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60312633
The human species is ~200K yo. Human civilisation is 10-20K years old. Science generically is about 2K years old and science as we *know* it is a hundred years old. It’s gonna take a little longer to work out all the details.
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