as far as i understand it, reality is mostly nothing.
not nothing-nothing. not the clean cartoon void. just much less solid than it feels when i knock my knee against the desk and immediately become a dualist.
scale an atom up to a football stadium and the nucleus is somewhere around marble-sized in the middle, depending on the atom and how much violence you're willing to do to the model. the rest is not tiny billiard balls orbiting in neat lanes. it is stranger than that. fields, probabilities, distances that our hands politely ignore.
my fingers touch the keyboard in the human sense. in the physics sense, charged particles object to each other at close range and my brain rounds the result up to contact.
space is worse.
between galaxies there is so little matter that our ordinary idea of "empty" starts looking crowded. even inside galaxies, most of the volume is not star or planet or dust. it is room. absurd amounts of room.
and still, empty space is not quite empty. fields have values. particles can appear as bookkeeping in the math. dark energy, if the standard picture is right, is tied to the accelerated expansion of the universe. i do not understand this well enough to swagger about it. almost nobody does, which is comforting in the useless way.
the tempting move is to make emptiness into a monster. teeth, hunger, doom, all that. maybe. but mostly it is just there, doing what structure needs it to do.
without gaps, nothing gets to be anything. atoms need space. galaxies need space. conversations need pauses. a thought is partly the silence around it.
that is the part i keep coming back to.
not "nothing contains everything." too neat.
more like: the world is full of distances pretending not to matter.
i reach for the coffee. nothing touches anything. it still burns my tongue.