Never trust atoms. They make up everything.

I know. That’s a groaner of a joke, but it’s true. Everything around us (and even us ourselves) is comprised of atoms. And atoms are weird things. Did you read this article I wrote a while back?

https://www.historicunioncounty.com/article/whole-lot-nothing

If you didn’t read that piece before, you should now. Not only is it pretty interesting stuff, but it will help you understand what I’m going to tell you this time around.

Almost all of the mass of an atom is at its center—the nucleus. Whizzing around this nucleus are the electrons. They don’t weigh much at all, but they do have a negative charge. That’s important. Remember when you were a kid and you first learned how magnets worked? You may have had a teacher or someone else hand you two magnets and ask you to play with them, exploring how they interacted. You quickly realized that magnetic poles of the same type repelled each other. If you tried to put two negative ends together, they pushed back.

Electrons are a lot like magnets with only one pole—the negative one. That means that two electrons will always repel each other. Try as they might, they cannot touch. The force that keeps them apart is a fundamental building block of our universe and it will not be denied. Electrons don’t touch. Period.

OK, so big deal, right? Yeah. It is a big deal. If electrons cannot touch (and we know they can’t) and if electrons are on the outer shell of every atom (and we know they are) and if everything in our universe is made of atoms (and we know it is) then … think about it … I’ll pause here for it to sink in …

You cannot actually touch anything.

That’s right. You are definitely NOT touching your phone or laptop or tablet or whatever else you might be using to read this article. Your backside is definitely NOT touching the seat of your chair—or even your pants. You are physically touching nothing. You are really, really close to a lot of stuff, but touching? No.

“But,” you protest, “I can FEEL stuff. I KNOW I’m touching it. You can’t fool me with all of your science and sorcery. I won’t believe it.”

Well, you believe you are touching stuff and you actually aren’t, so I think I can make you believe the opposite is true—and I’m not a sorcerer. The real trickery is happening inside your own brain. Your nerve endings can detect the repulsive force being exerted by the atoms in your keyboard, chair, bed, and whatever else you might be holding, tapping or sitting on. Those nerve endings are, remember, also made up of atoms. They are doing pushing of their own. Your brain picks up on all of this shoving and interprets it as the misnamed sense of touch.

What would happen if this repelling force didn’t exist? What could be the harm in actually allowing atoms to fall where they may, touching everything willy-nilly?

Plenty of really bad stuff, that’s what.

Remember all of the talk about empty space in the article I referenced above? Yeah, there’s a bunch more empty space than solid matter in anything you can think of. If the shell of electrons around an atomic nucleus didn’t maintain an invisible force field around the atom, then all of the electrons and nuclei would just jumble together and collapse in a pile of subatomic particles. If that happened, you would not be able to sit in a chair at all. All of your butt molecules, with their associated atoms, would just mingle and fall straight through the chair.

That’s actually a wildly simplified illustration. It wouldn’t just be you and your backside involved. It would be everything. Everything in existence would simply collapse toward the nearest center of gravity, passing through everything else along the way. There would be no cohesion of matter, no objects, no liquids, and no gases. Everything would just fall apart into a jumble of disjointed atomic debris. In short order, the entire universe would end up this way.

The energy that keeps things apart is ultimately the energy that keeps things together. So, back in the 1980s when M.C. Hammer said, “Can’t Touch This”, he wasn’t kidding. You can’t touch anything. Be glad you can’t.

This article was written by Tilmer Wright, Jr. Tilmer is an IT professional with over thirty years of experience wrestling with technology and a proud member of the Authors Guild of Tennessee. In his spare time, he writes books.

You can find links to Tilmer’s books at the following location: https://www.amazon.com/Tilmer-Wright/e/B00DVKGG4K%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_sc...

His author information web site is here: http://www.tilmerwrightjr.com/

Photo credit (no changes): Lambtron [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]