Touch the screen.
You feel resistance.
Certainty.
A clear boundary between you and the world.
But physics quietly disagrees with everything your senses report.
Nothing you have ever touched has actually touched you.
Not the screen.
Not the floor.
Not the chair supporting your weight.
Atoms never meet.
They never collide.
They never overlap.
And yet, despite all this emptiness, you have never fallen through the floor or passed through a wall.
No glitches.
No warnings.
No exceptions.
So what is stopping you?
🧠 “Solid” Is a Sensation, Not a Property
We grow up believing objects are solid because they are tightly packed.
Physics says that idea is wrong.
Atoms are mostly empty space.
If a single atom were expanded to the size of a football stadium:
- The nucleus would be a grain of sand at the center
- The electrons would be tiny dots far away
- Everything in between would be emptiness
Your body is made of this.
The floor is made of this.
The entire planet is made of this.
So why does emptiness behave like a wall?
Because solidity is not about contact.
It’s about resistance.
⚡ The Force That Actually Holds You Up
Gravity pulls you downward.
If gravity were the only force involved, you would fall straight through the floor as if it didn’t exist.
The force that stops you is far stronger and far less talked about:
electromagnetic force.
When the atoms in your feet approach the atoms in the floor:
- Their electron clouds repel each other
- This repulsion activates instantly
- It overwhelms gravity completely
You never reach the floor.
You are stopped before contact is possible.
🧲 Why Atoms Refuse to Overlap
Electrons are governed by strict quantum rules.
They:
- Cannot share the same quantum state
- Cannot occupy the same space in the same way
- Strongly resist compression
When two objects approach each other, their electron clouds begin to overlap.
That overlap is forbidden.
So the universe responds with force.
This force is not slow.
Not gradual.
Not optional.
It is immediate refusal.
What you feel as hardness is the universe enforcing rules you never see.
🪑 Standing Still Is Not Passive
Standing feels effortless.
But from a physics perspective, it is anything but.
Right now:
- Gravity pulls you downward
- The floor pushes upward
- Electromagnetic forces balance your weight
This balance must be maintained continuously.
If it failed for even a fraction of a second, you would fall through the ground.
Standing, sitting, walking — these are not states of rest.
They are stable battles that never stop.
🧪 Why Soft Things Still Stop You
A mattress feels different from concrete.
Sand feels different from steel.
But none of them let you pass through.
Why?
Because the same atomic forces are at work.
The difference is structure.
In soft materials:
- Atomic bonds rearrange easily
- Layers shift
- Shape changes under pressure
You’re not passing through matter.
Matter is reorganizing itself to keep you out.
⚖️ The Strength Difference That Breaks Intuition
Here is a number that completely changes how you see reality:
Electromagnetic force is approximately
10³⁶ times stronger than gravity.
That’s a 1 followed by 36 zeros.
Gravity feels powerful only because:
- It always pulls
- It never cancels
- It acts over massive distances
At the scale of atoms and everyday objects, gravity is almost irrelevant.
The floor does not hold you up because it is heavy.
It holds you up because its atoms refuse overlap with extreme force.
🌍 Why the Earth Itself Doesn’t Collapse
This same physics keeps the planet intact.
Gravity constantly tries to compress Earth inward.
Atomic repulsion pushes back.
Without this resistance:
- Matter would collapse into itself
- Planets would shrink endlessly
- Structure would disappear
Even stars rely on similar balance mechanisms to avoid collapse.
Reality exists because forces disagree.
🧠 Why “Touch” Is an Illusion
This is the strangest part.
When you touch something:
- No atoms meet
- No surfaces connect
- No matter overlaps
Your nerves detect electromagnetic resistance and translate it as touch.
Touch is not contact.
Touch is force perception.
The universe never allows true physical contact at the atomic level.
🌌 Why Passing Through Walls Will Never Happen
Science fiction loves the idea.
But physics is unforgiving.
To pass through a wall, you would need to:
- Overcome electromagnetic repulsion
- Break quantum rules
- Ignore atomic structure
This would require energy so extreme it would destroy both you and the wall long before overlap occurred.
Passing through matter is not difficult.
It is forbidden.
🧠 A Perspective That Changes Reality
You are not touching the world.
You are hovering an unimaginably tiny distance above it.
Held in place by invisible fields that behave like solid barriers.
Every step you take is supported by rules written into the fabric of reality.
They do not negotiate.
They do not fail.
They do not announce themselves.
🌌 The Quiet Truth About Solidity
The universe is not solid.
It is stable.
Built from emptiness that behaves like resistance.
Held together by invisible forces that never sleep.
Nothing touches you.
And yet, nothing lets you pass.
That contradiction is not a flaw in reality.
It’s the reason reality works at all.
