Right now, as you read this, you're sitting on something solid. A chair, a couch, maybe a bed. Your body presses against a surface that pushes back. Nothing about this moment suggests illusion. And yet physics has an unsettling confession to make.

The atoms that compose your body, your chair, and everything you've ever touched are almost entirely nothing. Not mostly solid with a little space around the edges. Not even half and half. Your physical form is 99.9999% empty space dressed up as matter. Which raises an uncomfortable question: what exactly have you been touching all your life?

Picture a hydrogen atom scaled up so the nucleus becomes a marble sitting at center court of a football stadium. The electron? A speck of dust somewhere in the nosebleed seats. Everything between them—the entire field, the stands, the concession areas—is emptiness. Pure, undisturbed nothing.

This isn't an edge case. Every atom follows roughly the same blueprint. The oxygen you're breathing, the calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood—all of it organized around the same architecture of isolated particles separated by astronomical relative distances. If you removed all the empty space from every atom in every human body on Earth, the remaining matter would fit inside a sugar cube.

You are, quite literally, a walking vacuum with delusions of density. The hand you see in front of you contains more nothing than something by a ratio that would embarrass most decimal points. And somehow this absence has convinced itself it can pick things up.

Takeaway

Solid matter is a story told by particles so far apart they'd need binoculars to see each other. You're less a thing than an arrangement.

If your body is mostly empty space, and the floor is mostly empty space, why don't you fall through? Why can't your hand pass through the table like a ghost through fog? The answer reveals something stranger than the emptiness itself.

Electrons carry negative charge. When the electron clouds of your atoms approach the electron clouds of another object's atoms, they repel each other with electromagnetic force. You've never actually touched anything in your entire life. Every surface you've felt, every handshake you've exchanged, every kiss—all of it was electromagnetic repulsion interpreted by your nervous system as contact. There's always a tiny gap, a no-man's-land where force fields negotiate.

What you experience as the solid resistance of a table is really a push from invisible fields. The floor doesn't hold you up through physical contact. It holds you up through mutual electromagnetic rejection, like two magnets with matching poles refusing to meet. Solidity is a force field pretending to be a surface.

Takeaway

You've never touched anything. Every sensation of contact is actually electromagnetic repulsion—the universe's force fields pushing back.

Here's where things get philosophically interesting. If solid matter is mostly empty space held together by forces, is anything actually solid? Does 'solid' even mean anything? Or have we been using the wrong word all along?

One answer is that we need to update our vocabulary. 'Solid' doesn't mean 'densely packed with stuff.' It means 'resists penetration by other objects at our scale of existence.' The table is solid in every way that matters for your morning coffee. The definition just needed to accommodate new information about what's doing the resisting.

But there's a deeper response available. Perhaps direct experience and physics aren't competing descriptions of the same reality. They're different levels of explanation, each true in its own domain. Your fingers report genuine information about how matter behaves at human scales. Physics reports genuine information about what that matter is made of. The table is solid and mostly empty space. Both statements describe reality. Neither one is the illusion.

Takeaway

Reality operates at multiple scales simultaneously. What's true for electrons doesn't cancel what's true for tables—and you exist in both worlds at once.

You're a pattern of mostly nothing, held together by invisible forces, experiencing yourself as solid through sensations that aren't technically contact. This should be disorienting. Somehow, it isn't. You'll still stub your toe tomorrow and curse the coffee table.

Perhaps that's the takeaway. Reality is under no obligation to feel as strange as it is. The universe built you out of emptiness and force fields, then gave you nerves that report back: solid, present, here. Physics doesn't debunk your experience. It just reveals the elegant machinery behind the obvious.