Thank you for your response. >If you could, in fact, apply the same force you apply to lift the cup to a single atom, it might indeed be sufficient to remove t

Thank you for your response. >If you could, in fact, apply the same force you apply to lift the cup to a single atom, it might indeed be sufficient to remove that single atom from the cup (I haven't looked up specific numbers) instead of lifting the entire cup. (In fact, it might depend on what the cup was made of: a styrofoam cup would certainly lose an atom, even a ceramic cup might, but a cup made of diamond or carbon nanotubes might not. Material strengths vary over many orders of magnitude.) I think a less careful form of this (e.g. not including stuff about different materials) was most of what I was trying to say. I thought "force required to remove a part" was insufficient, because it doesn't include anything about how the force is applied, or how small the part removed can be, etc. > Certainly more than 3; possibly as many as 9. Ok, thanks. My physical intuition doesn't tend to be all that great. Thanks for correcting me on this point. > I'm basing my statements on the actual physics involved. I am trying to do that, looking up information about different materials, but I don't have any actual experience with like, materials science or whatever (not sure what the right term is), and I suddenly was wondering if you did have experience with that, and that from that perspective I might be obviously wrong. > Different people use the term "object" for different purposes. Yeah, I didn't mean to suggest that people ought to use a single meaning for the term. I was just trying to think about what precise definition would be most(?) useful for general use, when some other one hasn't been chosen for whatever reason. So like, what somewhat precise definition fits best with the most people's intuitions/usage of the term. >Note that this is for a particular case, very thin columns of water in capillary tubes, where the water can actually act somewhat like a solid, at least in resisting tensile forces (i.e., being pulled apart). A liquid in bulk doesn't really have a meaningful tensile strength. Ok, that makes sense. (I'm a little surprised about that last part, as I was imagining like, a blob of water in microgravity (with air pressure), and pulling it apart (somehow), but I guess applying force to it would cause it to deform before splitting in two, so maybe the cross sectional area wouldn't be well defined (but isn't that kind of like other materials also? oh well.)? Or I guess the force needed could depend on the amount of water or something in a complicated way which doesn't correspond nicely with tensile strength? (I had been considering if the "tensile strength" of free floating water was really small but nonzero, then there might be some value that all "objects" have a tensile strength above, but that probably doesn't make much sense.)) Again, thank you for your response, and for correcting me on some things I was wrong about.