Is it true physical contact impossible?

What they probably meant is this: the electrons in adjacent atoms repel each other, so atoms never physically touch.

Well, let’s just say you can get close enough to feel the electrons repeling…lol!

@yankeetooter Right! lol

One thing to keep in mind is that scientific discoveries like this give us options. We could continue saying that things touch and change what we think touching consists of, or we could say that nothing actually touches at all. These are conceptual questions, and their answers are not entailed by scientific research.

So would the electric charge of said electrons be “firing” our nerve endings, because we definitely experience the sense of touch…

I just think it’s wierd. When we touch things, we feel everything. We feel texture, heat, cold, etc. When we shake someones hand, we say we made physical contact. When cuddle with a significant other, we say we made physical contact. We definitely sense touch and all that is related to touch.

Well it’s been this way since the beginning of time, so our brains evolved to sense the atomic interactions that do happen. It doesn’t matter that atoms aren’t physically slapping up against each other; we sense the interactions between the electrons.

This is kindof a semantic mashup of the word touch.
In the sense that there’s always going to be space between nuclei of atoms in mater under conditions in which “us” still exist, then sure.
But ‘touch’ is certainly something that we usually mean to be tangential adjacency of boundary surfaces, like skin to skin (hey! shaking hands okay?) especially when that’s perceivable by “us”.

Grab hold of your loved one and jump into a black hole, at some point you’ll be touching (though dead).