The Solid Lie

If you have never touched anything, the next question is what "anything" even is — and the chair holding you up turns out to be a magnificent bluff. It feels dense, final, certain. It is almost entirely nothing at all.

Every atom is a vast emptiness with a tiny speck at its centre. Blow one up until its core is the size of a marble, and the nearest electron is a couple of football fields away, with pure void in between. Everything you think of as solid — the chair, the floor, the bone in your hand — is this same nearly-empty scaffolding, held in shape by forces, not by stuff.

How empty? If you could squeeze the gaps out of every atom in every human being alive, removing nothing but the emptiness, the entire human species — all eight billion of us — would pack down into the volume of a single sugar cube.

You are a cloud pretending to be a thing, resting on another cloud doing the same.

And if matter is mostly a rumour — where is the part of it that's actually there?