It’s somehow being repelled and attracted to stay on my hands at the same time
That’s misconception. Touching is literally reaching close enough for the repelling barrier to work. And dirt sticks to hands because it’s wet (or your hands are wet/oily, same thing) . Water acts like a glue on small scale
Why don’t all the rocks roll off big mountains?
It is a matter of extreme scales between the size of a particle of dirt and the scale of atomic force.
The issue is how narrow of a scope of scale is available to you in human intuitive experience. The real universe is far far larger and far far smaller than what it seems.
I recommend this video by Sixty Symbols, the same production of Numberphile and Computerphile in case you’ve heard of them.
But basically, when atoms are close enough to each other they attract each other (van der Waals force), which can cause things to stick to each other even without chemical bonds.
That sounds like “touching” has a really loose definition. If we go that way, you could say that our bodies are clouds of atoms that never touch one another
That is technically correct. The electrical field each atom is making means the electrons of each atom are not directly touching each other, so we are just a ton of atoms not touching each other outside of electrical fields.
It’s better to include the field in your atom definition - it’s an important part of it. Then you’ll see they do touch.
Not touching, can’t get mad!
Dirt is sticky. Stickiness comes from intermolecular forces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermolecular_force
For things that stick, you can imagine that when the molecules are close, but not too close, they attract each other because of the molecules’ overall electromagnetic charges result in attraction. But once they get really close, the actual distribution of each molecule’s charge starts to matter, and in particular the negatively charged electron clouds get close to each other first, and repel.
What this guy said. Two different electrical charges.
Magnetism.
There are multiple phisical forces at play. One force preventing two atoms beeing touched and one attracting stuff you touch.
I recently made this comment. This post reminds me again of that :D
something like vander waals forces applies in certain situations.
"BUT YOUR HONOR, I DID NOT STAB THE VICTIM, I DID NOT EVEN TOUCH¹ THE KNIFE!
¹scientifically speaking"
