system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: if there is no actual "touch", just electric impulses between atoms that give the feeling of touching, how does a knife, for example, break bonds to "cut" something?
gpt
There are two kinds of bonds- intramolecular (forces that hold atoms together in a molecule) and intermolecular (forces that exist between 2 or more molecules). Typically intermolecular forces are much weaker and those are the bonds you can sever to make a "cut". For visualization, think of a bowl of uncooked rice and you take a chopstick to make a imaginary line to through the bowl. You are not cutting any individual/singular rice, but your chopstick will still go through because the pressure you are creating are enough for the rice to essentially get out of the way. In this case, each rice is a stand in for one molecule made of atoms. So while you can separate the molecules (rice) from themselves, but you cannot split a single molecule (not with a chopstick at least). A knife works similarly on a microscopic level, by creating pressure and repulsion between the molecules to separate and therefore cut. Hope this helps.