The images below depict two perfectly cubic 1 cc volumes of any metal, both contain 2.7 x 1019 atoms and each of their six faces are composed of 1 x 78 atoms, i.e. 700,000,000 individual atoms.
As is observed in practice when these faces are brought into close contact these cubes will immediately and permanently bond into a single 2 cc entity.
It is stated in scientific publications that ultimately metals are composed of atoms which are kinetically “rotating and vibrating” in place.
And, following Rutherford’s assertion in 1919 that an atom was almost entirely composed of a vacuum, physicists needed to come up with explanations for how such a structure of atoms, in constant “kinetic” motion, interacted to create the observed strong cohesion of metals, and this is an example:-
“Metallic bonding is a type of chemical bonding that rises from the electrostatic attractive force between conduction electrons (in the form of an electron cloud of delocalized electrons) and positively charged metal ions. It may be described as the sharing of free electrons among a structure of positively charged ions (cations). Metallic bonding accounts for many physical properties of metals, such as strength, ductility, thermal and electrical resistivity and conductivity, opacity, and luster.”
“The metal is held together by the strong forces of attraction between the delocalised electrons and the positive ions.”
And so it was then, necessarily, assumed by physicists that these “strong forces of attraction” could act through the relatively vast, Rutherfordian, sub-atomic vacuum between the minuscule nucleus and surrounding electrons and then on through both the inter-atomic vacuum and the sub-atomic vacua of adjacent atoms, as depicted in the diagram below where the nucleus is, in these hypothetical circumstances, far to small to depict and, the now observed very strong force of cohesion, is indicated by the red arrows.
