Forums → WEPR → Can two people touch eachother?

Well I would like to know what your definition of touching is.

The true definitions of touch can be found on here.

Where touch is defined as the following:

1. to put the hand, finger, etc., on or into contact with (something) to feel it: He touched the iron cautiously.
2. to come into contact with and perceive (something), as the hand or the like does.
3. to bring (the hand, finger, etc., or something held) into contact with something: She touched a match to the papers.
4. to give a slight tap or pat to with the hand, finger, etc.; strike or hit gently or lightly.
5. to come into or be in contact with.

All of these, "Can... do this," topics really all have to do with the definition. You tried to prove by making it seem like the definition of touch is for two electrons to come into contact. It's not.

Well i guess it is about wether you can feel soemone. But hearing this argument I began to think, do we even know what touch is? Touch could be the feeling of electrons repelling one another. Maybe touch is actually inconceivable. Maybe our knowledge of atoms is flawed, or perhaps there are other particles even smaller then the electron that allows us to come into contact. But with the basic agreement with scientists and people in today's world, it should be impossible for two humans to PHYSICALLY touch one another. Shouldn't it?

Win.

You may later come across the schools of thought on the various quantum forces: strong and weak nuclear forces etc. that are relevant to the fundaments of molecular physics (seeing as how come the electrons don't collapse in on the positively charged nucleus?)

I remember the day we learnt this in school. It was awesome. Note, however, that whether or not we can actually touch each other (under any semantic definition of the word), we wouldn't be able to tell thanks to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: it is impossible to know the location of any one particle at any one time due to the interfering influence of the measurement required to gain information from it. Therefore it is impossible to know whether or not anything was ever 'touching'. Hence one might also learn later that those 'orbital shells' that you think electrons whiz around in radial spheres, are actually 'robability shells' that actually have a variety of shapes and are dictated by a "95% confidence interval".

Where's Schroedinger's cat when you need it?

@ Strop I actually didn't learn this in school as I already knew about electrons, protons, etc. But never thought about this argument wich my friend told me he found on the internet somewhere. I am also confused about nuclear force, the force that holds the nucles together even though the protons should repel one another. Does anyone know exactly where it comes from?

@GregWeeler

I did not say that the defenition of touch was for two electrons to come in contact. The defenition of touch is, as you stated, to come in contact. Wich would be impossible as the electrons would repel one another. The two people would in fact be very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very close.

I guess this challenge sort of fails, as it seems like it does not need as much argueing as it at first seemed....I'll try and think of another challenging topic to argue and bring it up in a day or two...

Here is one for you, IF a tree falls but nobody is around to hear it, does it still make sound? The obvious answer most people would give you is of course yes, BUT it's not true, tell me why and i'll give you a cookie

@ BloodAvenger

Off topic, but it doesn't make a sound. It makes a noise, but sound is just the sensation you feel when you hear vibrations in the air.

you could touch someone by stabbing your arm into theirs?

@bloodavenger
it does make a sound because when it falls and hits the ground sound-waves propell off until hit by another object Ex. say it's in a sound-proof metal box, sure noone on the outside could hear it, but it would still make a sound

I'm sorry but I believe the answer is YES....i don't get a cookie....

Sound is just vibration. The sound is then heardby humans or animals. In order for us to hear a sound it must already exist, therefore sound is made with or without the presence of human perception. It would make a sound, just an unperceived sound.


But then theres the question of Existence without perception.If no one is around to see, hear, touch or smell the tree, how could its existence occur? Me and the same friend who brought up the topic of two people touching argue about this one alot.According to substance theory, a substance is distinct from its properties. According to bundle theory, an object is merely its sense data. So in the end, there is no general agreement on the subject. So i do not recieve a cookie, because I did not say no.

so atom spliting is the only time things actually 'touch' (atom wise)

Here is one for you, IF a tree falls but nobody is around to hear it, does it still make sound? The obvious answer most people would give you is of course yes, BUT it's not true, tell me why and i'll give you a cookie

I think it is okay for somebody to do that. They can do what they want and it would be okay. I am sorry if this is not what you are asking of me.

I haven't read anything but you never touch anything. As you said the electrons repel each other. For you to touch something you'd need to have no electrons. And then you would just go through someone like a ghost, then you would be touching.

Oh, I see we are talking about atoms. Well, actaully, Klaushouse said it all!

I am also confused about nuclear force, the force that holds the nucles together even though the protons should repel one another. Does anyone know exactly where it comes from?

so atom spliting is the only time things actually 'touch' (atom wise)

The nuclear force (or nucleon-nucleon interaction or residual strong force) is the force between two or more nucleons. It is responsible for binding of protons and neutrons into atomic nuclei. To a large extent, this force can be understood in terms of the exchange of virtual light mesons, such as the pions. Sometimes the nuclear force is called the residual strong force, in contrast to the strong interactions which are now understood to arise from quantum chromodynamics (QCD). This phrasing arose during the 1970s when QCD was being established. Before that time, the strong nuclear force referred to the inter-nucleon potential. After the verification of the quark model, strong interaction has come to mean QCD.

Since nucleons have no color charge, the nuclear force does not directly involve the force carriers of quantum chromodynamics, the gluons. However, just as electrically neutral atoms (each composed of cancelling charges) attract each other via the second-order effects of electrical polarization, via the van der Waals forces (London forces), so by analogy, "color-neutral" nucleons may attract each other by a type of polarization which allows some basically gluon-mediated effects to be carried from one color-neutral nucleon to another, via the virtual mesons which transmit the forces, and which themselves are held together by virtual gluons. It is this van der Waals-like nature which is responsible for the term "residual" in the term "residual strong force." The basic idea is that while the nucleons are "color-neutral," just as atoms are "charge-neutral," in both cases, polarization effects acting between near-by neutral particles allow a "residual" charge effect to cause net charge-mediated attraction between uncharged species, although it is necessarily of a much weaker and less direct nature than the basic forces which act internally within the particles.[1]
(Wikipedia.com)

As people say "I am spliting atoms!", that is not true. When you try to "split atoms" you are just causeing them to move away from you. So you can not touch them because you are moving them by the wind.