O²

You’ve never touched anything in your life. Not your phone. Not your morning coffee. Not the person you love. Every atom in your body is 99.9999999999999% empty space. If the core of an atom were the size of a marble, the nearest electron would be all the way out in the parking lot of a football stadium. Everything in between is empty. We’ve known this since 1911. A physicist named Ernest Rutherford fired tiny particles at a sheet of gold foil expecting them all to pass right through. Most did. But about 1 in 8,000 bounced straight back at him. He said it was like firing a cannon at tissue paper and having the shell come back and hit you. That one result proved every atom is almost entirely void, with all its weight crammed into a core 100,000 times smaller than the atom itself. So when you sit in a chair, you’re not actually sitting on it. The electrons in your body are pushing against the electrons in the chair. Same force that makes two magnets resist each other when you flip one around. You’re floating above the surface, separated by a gap about 10,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper. Every handshake is two invisible clouds of electrons pressing against each other without ever merging. Remove all that empty space from every atom in every human on Earth, and 8 billion people compress down to a single sugar cube. It would weigh billions of tons and fall straight through the floor, through the crust, all the way to the center of the Earth. Same density as a neutron star. But the tweet gets one thing a little wrong. Whether atoms “touch” depends on how you define touch. Philip Moriarty, a physicist at the University of Nottingham who literally pushes individual atoms around with a needle for a living, says contact does happen at the atomic level. It’s the point where the pull between atoms balances the push. And when you eat food, your body breaks those molecules apart and chemically bonds with them, atoms merging across boundaries. That’s real contact. So what you feel when you hold someone’s hand isn’t skin on skin. It’s the same force that holds together every molecule in every star, pressing your electrons against theirs. You’ve never made contact the way your brain pictures it. What’s actually happening is stranger and honestly way cooler.