/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.2004182]

When you touch something, are you actually touching it?

[Anonymous No.2004188]

well if you touch it, then yes you are touching it... no matter what your define "touching" as, if you are touching it then you are touching it

[Anonymous No.2004213]

>>2004188
Good point let me try to reword a little


When you touch an object, does the matter which constitutes your finger contact the matter which constitutes the object?

[Anonymous No.2004218]

/sci/ - Pseudophilosophy

[Anonymous No.2004231]

>>2004213
no, atomic collision does not occur like that, it only occurs like that in unusual cases such as a black hole, a black hole is essentially a miniature primordial atom. when you touch something the forces of your atoms are repeling the forces of the opposing objects atoms creating a sensation of pressure but no physical contact is technically occuring.

[Anonymous No.2004243]

>>2004213
I remember I asked this question to our phys teacher in highschool. He replied:"Nothing ever touched anything."

When you're standing on the floor, you're actually floating picometers above it.

Contact doesn't exist in the microcosm, and any macroscopically perceived contact is actually particles getting very close.

>>2004218
Uneducated swine.

[Anonymous No.2004250]

exclusion principle anyone?

[Anonymous No.2004251]

The "lol it's the repulsion so you're not ACTUALLY touching it argument" infuriates me.

We've DEFINED touch to be the electrostatic repulsion that we experience. That IS contact. What else do you want? Since matter is all wave-like at small scales the concept of touch as we visualize it on the macroscopic scale is not even defined at the quantum level. Do you require wave-packet overlap? Something like the Rayleigh criterion? If you define "touch" this way it would be a purposeless concept.

So yes, when you touch something you do touch it.

[Anonymous No.2004255]

>>2004231
thats interesting

[Anonymous No.2004269]

By definition, yes.

[Anonymous No.2004275]

Man, I wish I had some weed for this thread.

[Anonymous No.2004286]

Well the particles the make up our body are mostly empty space, and the reason why (let's say) your hand doesn't go through a wall when putting itself up against is because the electrons in each particles are repelling themselves up against each other (like how when you put two magnets of the same polarity against together they try to push each other a way). So no matter how hard you push your hands up against each other, for example, they never really do make full contact.

[Anonymous No.2004291]

>>2004286
My god my grammar is terrible...

[Anonymous No.2004297]

>>2004251
U so mad.

[Anonymous No.2004310]

>>2004286
"Full contact" being? Nucleons within range of the strong interaction? But wait! Quarks are fermions, and obey the exclusion principle, so you have to get past the degeneracy pressure to get them to "touch". But at such high energies you cannot precisely discern their location, neither in space nor time. Not to mention they're wave-packets, so there isn't even anything physical to make "contact". They will make contact in the same sense two ripples across a pond make contact with one another.

[Anonymous No.2004319]

> "Hey, stop touching me."
> "I'm not actually touching you, it's just the atoms repelling each other, LOLOL!"
> trollface.jpg

[Anonymous No.2004325]

>>2004310
>"Full contact" being?
Actually touching one another or going through each other. No matter how hard and close your hands are pushed together, there's always at least a little space between each atom and particle of said hand.

[Anonymous No.2004334]

>mfw OP has totally gone out the window expecting layman's terms.

[Anonymous No.2004346]

ITT: anyone who thinks that two things ever actually touch needs to learn2normalforce/basicphysics