The Force That Holds the World at Arm's Length

You have never touched anything. Not once. Not your own face, not the ground beneath you, not the hand of anyone you have ever loved. The electrons on the surface of your skin carry a charge, and the electrons on the surface of everything else carry the same charge, and identical charges repel — not metaphorically, not almost, but absolutely. The closer two surfaces come, the harder that invisible wall pushes back. What you feel when you press your palm flat against a table is not contact. It is resistance. A force field, older than the Earth, holding you a few hundred millionths of a millimetre from everything you think you're touching.

This force has a name: electromagnetism. It is one of only four forces that govern everything that happens in the universe — every chemical reaction, every nerve signal, every flame, every heartbeat. Without it, your body would dissolve into a cloud of particles in an instant. With it, nothing in the universe can ever truly reach anything else.

The strange part is not that this is true. The strange part is that it feels like nothing at all. The push of the table against your hand is the universe's most fundamental barrier, and your brain has decided, for the whole of your life, to call that barrier 'solid'. You have built an entire model of a world made of things you can hold — and not one atom of it has ever been held.