14-billion-years-later:

On why you never really touch anything.

Although this may not be remarkable to most of you it’s something that blows my mind everytime I think about it. Right now you’re probably sitting down on a chair or something, but in reality you’re actually hovering just slightly above it. The distance itself is tiny around about 1/10000000000 of a metre or one Angstrom for those in the know. But why? Well it all has to do with our good old friend, electro-static repulsion. You see the electrons that make up you and the electrons that make up the chair have a repulsive effect, which means they can only ever come within a certain distance of each other but never touch. This effect is also the reason behind why we can’t walk through walls, despite as you may know matter being almost entirely empty space. Everything that feels solid to you is really just an illusion made by the forces between electrons.

this just blew my mind

(via wopwa-deactivated20111031-deact)