The Force With No Name You Know

You have never touched anything. Not once. Not the chair beneath you, not the face of someone you love, not your own hands pressed together right now. What you feel when two surfaces meet is not contact — it is repulsion. The electrons on the edge of your skin and the electrons on the edge of everything else carry the same charge, and like charges never meet. They push. Hard. What you have always called 'touch' is the feeling of that push arriving at your nerves. A shove so fast, so constant, so woven into every second of your life that your brain invented an entirely new word for it — *feeling* — and forgot to mention it was never contact at all. The force doing this is electromagnetic, and it is one of only four forces holding the universe together. It keeps your feet on the floor, your atoms from flying apart, and your body from falling straight through the Earth — which, given that matter is almost entirely empty space, it absolutely should. The rock you stand on is not solid. It is a web of emptiness held shut by invisible repulsion. You are floating, always. You just cannot feel the gap.