In high school I learnt that an atom’s nucleus is like a pea in the centre of a football stadium where the stadium is the whole atom and the electrons are far away from the pea, but inside the stadium. (And I also learnt about electron probability clouds, etc)
Anyway, it seems that things like electrons, protons, and neutrons have a volume. (e.g. the nucleus has a pea volume)… so it seems logical that they could sometimes hit each other…
I was wondering, when you have two large-scale objects colliding into each other (e.g. two hands or two bricks) does that cause lots of electrons and nuclei to hit each other? Or are they prevented some touching due to some kind of force? And what stops two bricks from going inside each other? Is it the collisions of little subatomic particles (electrons, etc) Or is it some kind of repulsion force between the atoms where the subatomic particles don’t necessarily touch? (or both?)
I’m not sure, I would think that when two large-scale objects are seen to touch, what you generally have is the electron shells of the surface atoms of each object getting close enough to electrostatically repel each other. The nuclei of each atom are surrounded by the electrons so I doubt they’d play a part in the contact.
(Trying to remember what force it is that keeps the negatively charged electrons from flying into the positively charged nucleus and thus collapsing the atom – would that be the ‘weak’ force?? )
Yep. The outer electrons in your finger and in, say, the table, are both negatively charged, so they repel each other as they approach. The force required to bring identically charged particles into contact is extreme, which is one reason why it’s so hard to get nuclear reactions to go.
This pretty well sums it up. When a piano falls on your head, it’s not the piano that kills you, it’s the repulsive electromagnetic effect betweent he electrons in your skull and the ones in the piano.
On the other hand, that ‘repulsive effect’ probably wouldn’t be enough to kill you if it didn’t have the momentum of the falling piano driving it. You’d get a similar repulsive effect if you happened to rub your head against a piano that was just sitting there.
My old high-school physics teacher likened atomic electrons to spinning fan blades. Trying to slip two atoms’ electons past each other is like trying to slip the blades of one fan through the blades of another: there’s room to do it, but it’s not gonna happen.
)
You’d get a similar repulsive effect if you happened to rub your head against a piano that was just sitting there.