So how does atoms work then?
I'm not a scientist but how I understand it (from copying and pasting off of a random google link) is:
"Atoms are small. Really, really small. You’ll probably have heard that matter is made of bundles of these tiny things. You’ll likely also know that you can’t see them with the naked eye. We are told to take on trust the idea that atoms are there, interacting with each other and being building blocks for our world. For most people, though, that’s not good enough. Science prides itself on the way it uses real observations to work out the mysteries of the universe – so how did we come to conclude that atoms exist, and what have we learned about these tiny structures?
It might seem as if there’s a simple way to prove atoms exist: put them under the microscope. But this approach won’t work. In fact, even the most powerful light-focusing microscopes can’t visualise single atoms. What makes an object visible is the way it deflects visible light waves. Atoms are so much smaller than the wavelength of visible light that the two don’t really interact. To put it another way, atoms are invisible to light itself. However, atoms do have observable effects on some of the things we can see.
Hundreds of years ago in 1785 Dutch scientist Jan Ingenhousz was studying a strange phenomenon that he couldn’t quite make sense of. Minute particles of coal dust were darting about on the surface of some alcohol in his lab.
About 50 years later, in 1827, the Scottish botanist Robert Brown described something curiously similar. He had his microscope trained on some pollen grains. Brown noticed that some of the grains released tiny particles – which would then move away from the pollen grain in a random jittery dance.
At first, Brown wondered if the particles were really some sort of unknown organism. He repeated the experiment with other substances like rock dust, which he knew wasn’t alive, and saw the same strange motion again.
It would take almost another century for science to offer an explanation. Einstein came along and developed a mathematical formula that would predict this very particular type of movement – by then called Brownian motion, after Robert Brown. Einstein’s theory was that that the particles from the pollen grains were being moved around because they were constantly crashing into millions of tinier molecules of water – molecules that were made of atoms."
They're also a currency in Fallout 76 where you pay real money for in-game items. In either case, Todd Howard has the answer for you: It just works.