The Force That Holds the World Apart

You reach out and press your palm flat against a table. You feel the table. You are certain of this. And you are wrong. Your hand never reached the table. It never reaches anything. Between the outermost electrons of your skin and the outermost electrons of every surface you have ever touched, there is a gap — unmeasurably small, but absolute. What you feel as solid contact is a war. The electrons in your hand and the electrons in the table carry the same charge. Same charges repel. They have always repelled. They will always repel. The sensation you call touch — the pressure, the texture, the warmth — is the feeling of that repulsion pushing back. Not contact. Resistance. You have never held anyone's hand. You have hovered, fractions of a nanometre away, while two invisible forces screamed at each other across a gap too small to see and too real to cross. This is not a metaphor. This is electromagnetism, the second-strongest force in the universe, and it has been keeping you from the world your entire life. Here is the part that should unsettle you further: the force doing this is the same force that carries light across three hundred million kilometres of empty space to reach your eye. Touch and sight are the same thing. You just experience them differently.