I think my favorite super power is probably the ability to walk through walls. I’ve always wanted to be able to break into any building, escape any pursuer, or drop through the floor instead of taking the stairs. It’s one of my main regrets that I’ll never be able to do it.
The next best thing to being able to do something is knowing as much as you can about it. In elementary school I’d learned that atoms were mostly empty space. You have the electrons and the nucleus, but it seemed to me that if you managed to squish two atoms into the same space then they might be able to pass through each other.
I was pretty excited to learn, when I got to middle school, why exactly objects couldn’t do that. For one thing, if you got the atoms occupying roughly the same space, then the electromagnetic forces would interfere with each other and the electrons of both atoms would be disrupted. This would severely mess up any chemistry that was going on with those atoms, and probably do very bad things to a person walking through a wall (and the wall itself).
Luckily, my youthful attempts to pass through my bedroom wall were doomed to fail for a reason that didn’t involve all of my molecules coming apart. Originally, I thought this was due to electron repulsion. According to my high school physics teachers, atoms can’t get that close together because the electrons of the atoms repell each other. Just like magnets of the same pole, two electrons will stay as far apart as they can. You can’t make use of all that empty space within an atoms because the electrons form a kind of force field to keep other atoms out of their own territory.
It turns out that electron repulsion isn’t actually what prevents objects from passing through each other. It’s actually a quantum effect called electron degeneracy pressure, Basically, two electrons can’t possibly be in the same place at once (that’s part of the Pauli exclusion principle). When electrons get too close to each other, they must assume different energy levels. This means that to bring electrons close together, you need to add enough energy to put most of them into very high energy states. The closer objects come, the more energy you need. On the macro-level, that manifests as degeneracy pressure. That’s why objects feel solid.
Understanding this almost makes up for not being able to walk through walls.