When you touch something what exactly is happening?
have you ever thought about it?
In a macro point of view, you might say
that you're exerting a force upon an object that you're 'touching.'
This is
correct, but what is this force?
And what causes it?
To answer this question
briefly, this is a phenomenon of electromagnetism.
That's cool Riley what
the hell is that?!
Simply it's the force that acts on electrically charged
particles.
Similar to how gravity is a force that acts on all things massive,
electromagnetism is a force that acts on all things electric.
Unlike gravity,
however,
electromagnetism can either attract or repel.
I'm sure you've
experienced something like this before.
Well, touch is a direct result of this,
but what I mean is if you play with magnets enough,
you will notice that when
you put two of the same sides together,
That they repel.
You will also notice
that just the opposite happens when you do the opposite.
You can think of
electrically charged particles like sides of a magnet.
For a negatively
charged particle,
for example an electron,
you can think of them like the south
side of a magnet.
When two of them are brought together they repel.
When you
introduce a North-Sided particle like the proton
to a south sided electron they
are attracted to each other.
this is called the electrostatic force,
However,
instead of saying north and south sided particles,
We say that a particle is
either positive or negatively charged.
This repulsion and attraction of charges
actually results
in almost all the physical phenomenon we experience daily.
Now back to touch.
If we zoom in on your hand and the object that you're touching,
we can see the atoms that build the border between your hand and the object.
Within the atoms, we see a nucleus of protons and neutrons and around them, electrons fly about.
The electrons in the opposing borders between your hand and the object that you're touching,
then repel each other.
just like two south sides
of a magnet.
This repulsion is exactly what you feel as a touch
For those who
might come across this problem,
the reason we don't always feel this
repulsion is because we actually do.
At great distances, however, the force of
repulsion of the electrons in you and whatever object is in question,
Almost completely matches the force of attraction of the electrons in you and
the protons in the object and vice-versa.
You can easily see this on a qualitative
model I made on desmos.
When two objects are far apart,
in this case, two atoms representing the imaginary borders of set objects,
the force of attraction
and the force of repulsion are almost equal.
At a distance of a centimeter for
example,
almost equal, pretty much means it is equal.
The difference between the
attraction and repulsion at this distance
is so small that it doesn't
matter.
When we bring the boarders and thus the electrons closer,
the force of repulsion felt by the electrons becomes exponentially greater
than the force of
attraction felt by them.
This results in what we've received as touch.
In this video you learned that, just like magnets,
opposite charges attract and
same charges repel.
This is called the electrostatic force, but is part of
something much bigger called electromagnetism.
You also learned that
this results in what we perceive as touch.
