Atoms Never Touch

About

Atoms Never Touch refers to memes, including webcomics, image macros and videos, about the fact that atoms never technically touch each other. The jokes were popularized by a viral 2020 comedy skit where a man explains to a police officer that atoms technically never touch, meaning he didn't actually punch a kid. The video inspired fan animations reenacting it on TikTok and comics and memes.

Origin

At an atomic level, atoms technically never touch. An outer shell of electrons surrounds every atom, which repels against other electrons as they have the same charge. This technically means you never touch anything, with feeling being attributed to the repulsion of the electrons. This is explained in a video by VSauce uploaded to YouTube^[1] on September 3rd, 2011, gaining over 6.8 million views in 10 years (shown below). It was also explained by Futurism.^[2]

On January 28th, 2020, TikToker^[3] @liamtheyee (Liam) posted a skit wearing a towel on his head saying, "did you know that atoms never touch each other and since we're made of atoms we've never touched anything in our entire lives. So to answer your questions, no officer I did not punch that kid" (shown below). The video gained over 2.5 million views in just under two years.

Spread

The Original Sound for Liams's video became notably popular, inspiring over 30,000 videos on TikTok in just under two years. On March 23rd, TikToker @jonathan.zhang posted a video where each word in the audio appears on a TI-84 Plus CE calculator, gaining over 7.8 million views in roughly two years (shown below).

The video also inspired webcomics. On April 11th, Imgur^[6] user GibThom uploaded a comic reimagining the TikTok (shown below). On July 8th, Instagram^[7] webcomic creator cathoardercomics posted a webcomic based on the audio (shown below, right).

Many people uploaded original animations reimagining the video. On June 21st, TikToker^[4] @king.science posted a video to the sound, gaining over 30 million views in a year (shown below, left). On July 29th, TikToker^[5] @mark_kacy posted an animation, gaining over 10 million views in a similar span of time (shown below, right).

On November 29th, Instagram^[8] user memelord posted an image macro referencing the video, gaining over 83,000 likes in 11 months (shown below).

The fact that atoms never touch is frequently shared by science and fact social media pages, such as by Instagram^[9][10] pages quantum.universe and conspirious in February and July 2021 respectively (shown below, left and right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References