system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How is friction possible if atoms never actually touch each other?

Hopefully I put the right words in the title. I don't know of any other way to put this.
gpt
Atoms may not touch in the way we normally imagine touch, but that's just because that idea of touch doesn't make sense on an atomic scale. It does not mean that touch never happens, it just means that our mental picture is only accurate at human scales.

When things interact through touching, such as with friction, it just means that the atoms have gotten close enough together to interact across the gap between them. The same way that magnets can interact withought getting into physical contact, atoms interact across microscopic distances to create the phenomena of friction.