wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) (05/13/85)
I'm far behind in reading many groups including these; please mail any responses, or mail me copies of ones you post, so I don't miss them. I recall reading, in some popularized-science book which has now been otherwise forgotten, that the force one feels when one presses one's hand against the wall is actually the electromagnetic repulsion between the electrons in the hand's atoms vs. the electrons in the wall's atoms. Is this true? If not, what is the origin or nature of whatever is experienced when objects "push" against each other? I suppose, on a sub-molecular level, there is a certain amount of "blending" together of my hand and the wall when I press it -- when I remove my hand, there are a discernable number of atoms/molecules from me left there in the wall, and from the wall in my hand. Since it appears that matter is made of really fairly-widely-spread-apart atoms in each molecule, and the molecules themselves are fairly widely spread, why don't we move *through* other matter more than we do, like "colliding" galaxies really pass through each other with little star-to-star contact? Is there something akin to "surface tension" that keeps pieces of "solid" matter from merging when pressed together? Will Martin USENET: seismo!brl-bmd!wmartin or ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA