The Force That Holds the World Apart

You reached for this sentence and your fingers found it — or so it felt. Here is what actually happened. The electrons in your fingertips and the electrons in whatever you just touched carry the same charge, and like charges refuse each other with a fury that has never once been overcome in the history of your life. The surface of your skin never arrived. It was repelled — gently, invisibly, completely — by a wall of electromagnetic force thinner than any knife could cut. What you call touch is your brain translating that repulsion into sensation. The floor is not holding you up. It is pushing you away from it, and has been every second you have been alive.

This is not a technicality. It is the actual mechanism. The force doing this — electromagnetism — is forty-two orders of magnitude stronger than gravity. Gravity moves galaxies. Electromagnetism is incomparably more powerful, and it spends most of its energy doing this one quiet, constant, imperceptible thing: keeping all matter from ever meeting any other matter. Your hands have shaped wood and held other hands and caught falling things, and in every single case, the particles never touched. There is a sense in which you are a ghost who has spent your entire life believing in walls. The walls are real. You just never reached them.