Contact force

[1] Contact forces are very common and are responsible for most visible interactions between macroscopic collections of matter.

Pushing a car or kicking a ball are some of the everyday examples where contact forces are at work.

[1] The atoms in the two surfaces cannot penetrate one another without a large investment of energy because there is no low energy state for which the electron wavefunctions from the two surfaces overlap; thus no microscopic force is needed to prevent this penetration.

On the more macroscopic level, such surfaces can be treated as a single object, and two bodies do not penetrate each other due to the stability of matter, which is again a consequence of Pauli exclusion principle, but also of the fundamental forces of nature: Cracks in the bodies do not widen due to electromagnetic forces that create the chemical bonds between the atoms; the atoms themselves do not disintegrate because of the electromagnetic forces between the electrons and the nuclei; and the nuclei do not disintegrate due to the nuclear forces.

Additionally, strain is created inside matter, and this strain is due to a combination of electromagnetic interactions (as electrons are attracted to nuclei and repelled from each other) and of Pauli exclusion principle, the latter working similarly to the case of normal force.

Block on a ramp and corresponding free body diagram of the block showing the contact force from the ramp onto the bottom of the block and separated into two components, a normal force N and a friction force f , along with the body force of gravity mg acting at the center of mass .