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?
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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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