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Non-contact forces like gravitational forces exist between two objects in any medium because of the establishment of a field/wave.

Since at an atomic level, 'physical' contact won't really be possible for any kind of force (contact or non-contact) , so is a 'field' established here as well? (albeit extremely small)

Also, if I consider gravity at this atomic/molecular level between two objects, is a gravitational field still formed? And as for contact force like friction, is friction forming a wave? At this level, friction, too, can be considered 'non-contact', right?

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For elementary particles, there are essentially only 4 types of interactions, gravitational ones, electromagnetic ones, and the weak and the strong nuclear forces. There are attempts, that to some extend describe those interaction as emergent of even more abstract theories, but that shouldn’t matter for the question.

Now if you are mainly interested in matter on earth and don’t want o describe the dynamics inside the nuclei. Most of the effects will be described by gravity and electromagnetism. That means for example, that, as already mentioned in another answer, it does not make sense to think about friction between individual particles. It is the electromagnetic interaction between many particles that leads to the emergence of friction, that we observe between bodies consisting of many individual particles. While an individual coulomb potential will decay with $\frac{1}{r}$, each term in the superposition of 2 coulomb potentials of opposite charges at different positions will already decay with $\frac{1}{r^2}$ or faster. This screening leads to very short range forces, when looking at overall charge neutral matter consisting of very high amounts of individual charges. For gravity such cancellation effects don’t exist, because there are no negative gravitational charges, there is only mass always acting attractive to other mass.

As for gravitational fields of individual molecules or atoms, it might surprise you that the answer is: We don’t know.

From an experimental side, consider that earth consists of an order of magnitude of 10^50 Atoms all of these pulling together results in the gravitational force we observe in our everyday life. The contribution of each single Atom is so small we can’t measure it.

From a theoretical perspective, it would seem reasonable to extrapolate general relativity, which should not make vastly different predictions to Newtonian gravity for such weak fields to anything, that is heavy enough or looked at from far away enough, that it can be described as a classical particle, this includes Atoms at earthly conditions. But we also know that general relativity in its current from is not naively extendable for application on quantum particles, so when for example looking at individual electrons we really don’t know how their gravitational fields look. But then again the gravitational interactions on such scales will be so small compared to any other interaction, it will hardly matter for the behavior of any physical system.

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Contact forces are not really real, they are just the result of other forces, almost always the electric force.

That means while there is no "contact force field" like there is a "gravitational field" or "electric field," but contact forces are the result of complicated interactions of electric fields.

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  • $\begingroup$ I see. What about the existence of gravitational force/field existing at an atomic level? $\endgroup$
    – Mel
    Commented Feb 23 at 8:05

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