Why Objects Do Not Share Space
Question:
You said that material objects are mostly empty space (See Cranial Contents). Why then is it
impossible for two objects to be at the same place at the same
time?
Answer:
To address this topic let's consider what exactly is going on
when a gentleman from the Dominican Republic named Mr. Sosa
brings his baseball bat into contact with the unfortunate ball.
You may have heard the phrase, "opposites attract",
possibly in reference to interpersonal relationships. That phrase
originated in the early days of experimenting with electricity.
It was discovered that electric charges come in two varieties
called positive and negative. When a positively charged object
was brought into the vicinity of a negatively charged object
there was a force that tended to pull the objects together. If
the two objects both carried the same charge, the force tended to
push the objects apart. Now, getting back to the bat and ball,
clearly there is a powerful interaction between these two
objects. My claim is that it is this same electrical force at
work.
The bat and ball are made up of atoms with
a positively charged nucleus and a negatively charged cloud of
electrons around the outside. Until the ball and bat are very
close to each other, the positive and negative charges of the
ball atoms are not distinguishable by the atoms of the bat. The
ball and bat appear electrically neutral to one another. Only
when the distance between ball and bat gets to be about the same
as the distance from the negative charges to the positive charges
in the atoms, do the ball and bat become "aware" of
each other. At that point the negative bat electrons are
beginning to feel a repelling force from the negative ball
electrons since the electron clouds are closer to each other than
to the neutralizing positive charge of the nucleus. The bat and
ball are both somewhat squishy so the atoms near the point of
contact are pushed back, allowing more atoms to become involved
in this collision. Eventually the sum of all the electronic
forces between bat and ball is enough to turn the ball around and
send it over the fence.
In fact all solid matter in the universe is surrounded by a
close fitting electrical force field that tends to exclude other
matter from penetrating its space.