Aristotle, one of the most influential people of his time, described all matter as being composed of the “four basic elements” fire, earth, air and water. All matter is composed of fire, wind, earth, and water! All matter is composed of tiny indivisible entities called atoms!

Democritus

It might seem as if there’s a simple way to prove atoms exist: put them under the microscope. Atoms are so much smaller than the wavelength of visible light that the two don’t really interact. To put it another way, atoms are invisible to light itself.

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Particles from empty space Quantum mechanics tells us that there is no such thing as empty space. Even the most perfect vacuum is actually filled by a roiling cloud of particles and antiparticles, which flare into existence and almost instantaneously fade back into nothingness.

Particles are, by their very nature, attracted to particles with an opposite charge, and they repel other similarly charged particles. This prevents electrons from ever coming in direct contact (in an atomic sense and literal sense). Their wave packets, on the other hand, can overlap, but never touch.

If you’ve ever tried the experiment, you know you can’t walk through a wall. But subatomic particles can pull off similar feats through a weird process called quantum tunneling. Tunneling would be an even bigger achievement.

You don’t actually “touch” anything at any level. When we “touch” something, the atoms of our fingertips approach the atoms of the surface we’re “touching”, at which point atomic forces prevent any closer proximity. The resistance we feel is actually mutual atomic repulsion from a distance.

You simply can’t walk through walls. Because according to the Pauli Exclusion Principle, no two particles can exist in the same place – it’s just impossible for both the particles — within the limits set by the uncertainty principle — to have the same position and same velocity.

Here’s The Reason You Can’t Actually Walk Through Walls, According to Science. You’ve probably heard that the atoms that make up your body and all other normal matter in the Universe are mostly empty space. Solid enough the elements in our atoms can’t just pass through the empty spaces of other atoms, and vice versa.

The molecules of air are far apart i.e. large gaps and we can walk through the air easily.

If you push on anything, it pushes back on you. That’s why if you lean against the wall, you don’t just fall through it. The wall pushes back on you as hard as you push on it, and you and the wall stay in place.

No. It’s not the atoms in the wall that are in the way of the atoms in your hand. It’s the electromagnetic forces surrounding those atoms.

The carpeted floor provides more friction against your foot, which means that you can provide more force against the floor. If you walk on a log that is floating in the water, the log moves backward. Why is this so? When you walk, the log pushes you forward, so you much push the log backwards.

We do not fall through the floor because the floor can produce tensions and compressions along the diagonal members and these zigzag from our feet to ends of the beam. The horizontal members have to feed the load from the diagonal members however and this load accumulates as you move away from the load.

The reason we do not fall to the center of the Earth is the same reason you don’t fall to the floor when you sit down in a chair; the electrons in your body repel the electrons in the chair. More specifically, there is an electron cloud around each atomic nucleus.

Fortunately for us, the earth has a lot of sideways momentum. Because of this sideways momentum, the earth is continually falling towards the sun and missing it. Scientists use fancy phrases for this effect such as “stable orbit” or “closed trajectory”, but fundamentally what they mean is “falling and missing”.

Gravity always pulls you towards the middle of the object. So for the Earth, which is shaped like a ball, the force of gravity pulls you to the centre from every point on the ground. That’s why, no matter where you stand on the Earth, you always feel like the ground is at the bottom and the sky is up.