Is it true you've never touched anything?

Put your hand on the table. It feels solid, right there, firm. Uncomfortable spoiler: you’re not touching it.

An atom is 99.99% empty space. If the nucleus were a marble in the center of a stadium, the electrons would be a faint buzz up in the stands; everything else, nothing. The matter you call “solid” is, overwhelmingly, void.

So why does it feel solid? Because the electrons in your skin repel the electrons in the table — same charge, they push each other away. That force is what you read as “touch,” but the two surfaces never actually meet: there’s always a tiny gap that never closes.

Technically, you’ve never touched anything in your life. What you call “touching” is two electromagnetic fields telling each other, up very close, “this far and no further.”