You would definitely be surprised if I tell you this- You
have never touched anything in your life. And not just you, anybody, including
me have not touched anything in our lives. As you are reading this article, you
are not even touching your computer/mobile or any other handheld device. Sounds
bizarre! Well, it’s actually not!
The touch
When we say touch, it means physical contact between two
bodies. And from the above statement I mean and we have not been able to do it.
Now this is becoming increasingly confusing. Well, physics has the explanation.
To start the explanation, we need to refresh the physics we know a bit,
starting from the design of atoms.
Physics did it
All bodies are made up of atoms. These atoms are made of
neutrons, protons (collectively called nucleon) and electrons revolving around
them in various shells. The size of atoms is governed by the average position
of electrons revolving around the nucleus.
Now let’s give a thought to the size
of an atom. A atom is 100,000 times the size of the nuclei. In real world it
means that if we assume nucleus to be the size of a peanut, the atom would be
of the size of a baseball stadium. Just imagine the space available for the
electrons to move around the nucleus as compared to the size of both (electrons
and nucleus). If the atoms of our body lose up all the dead space, we can be
fitted on a particle of dust and the entire human race on a volume of a sugar
cube!!
How do we have weight and are solid?
Given the scenario, our weight is the sum of the weight of
these components AND the energy (Remember Einstein’s discovery, mass can be
converted to energy?). The weight of protons, neutrons, quarks and this
(kinetic) energy are responsible for our weight.
This space which we call empty, is never actually empty, it
includes a lot of things like quantum fields and wave functions. In simple
words you can think of it as a fan. We can see a lot of space when it is
stopped, but when it is running, can you put your hand in the empty space? Technically,
electrons are point sources, which means they have no volume. But they do have
something called a wave function occupying a nice chunk of the atom. And
because quantum mechanics likes to be weird and confusing, the volumeless
electron is somehow simultaneously everywhere in that chunk of space.
Are you really touching?
Now when you touch the door or sit on the chair, you think
you are touching the chair, but as explained above, the mass of your butt is
due to the nuclei lying deep inside the atoms of your body surface. So you are
not feeling the atoms anymore, it is actually the electromagnetic force of the electrons
pushing away each other. On a very technical level, instead of actually
touching, you hover very slightly above the surface!
Source: Symmetry. Views/comments are welcome below.
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