I wrote this about 2 years ago and just stumbled across it again now while going through old files. How do you feel about it?

Most of us know that everything around us, including ourselves, is made up of trillions of tiny constituents called atoms. Words like electron, proton and neutron are familiar to us as the even smaller particles that make up the atoms. But what of the rest of the atom? Atoms are 99.9999999999999% empty space. Permeating this empty space are the invisible forces that hold the atom together, namely electromagnetic and nuclear force.
So if atoms are almost entirely empty space, and we are made up purely of atoms and invisible forces acting upon these atoms... then are we not also almost entirely empty space? And if so, why do physical objects feel as though they have such substance and mass? To say that everything that makes up the earth is 99.999999999999% empty space seems impossible to our intuition and senses.
Could it be that, given no original reference point, we as humans are experiencing the subjective illusion of solid substance? Perhaps it takes only the smallest amount of matter combined with a conscious awareness to project and evolve this matter into an observed universe.
Everything may be mostly empty space, but as we have no comparable universe that is built with atoms of higher density, this becomes our one true reality and the amount of empty space contained within us becomes irrelevant. Whether our atoms came about as 99% empty space or 50% empty space, although our universe would be much different, it would still be our one true reality. With no other universe to relatively compare it to, this one reality becomes our benchmark for "solid substance".
I guess fundamentally this means you turn a universe dominated by empty space into a universe teeming with life and beauty simply by existing in this dimension and being aware of your surroundings. Such is the power of your consciousness. By definition I suppose this would mean we are all gods. Neat!

...in what way does any of that make us " all gods " ?

or make any sense?

If you're just 99% empty space and and God too, you should have to problem flying. So open a window (on first floor please) - jump out and tell me how that goes.

I think you're missing the connection that physics tell us that the universe is constructed of matter and force that holds it all together. Is matter fundamentally more important than the force that bonds it?

Keep it coming

"Things are not empty space. Our classical intuition fails at the quantum level.

Matter does not pass through other matter mainly due to the Pauli exclusion principle and due to the electromagnetic repulsion of the electrons. The closer you bring two atoms, i.e. the more the areas of non-zero expectation for their electrons overlap, the stronger will the repulsion due to the Pauli principle be, since it can never happen that two electrons possess exactly the same spin and the same probability to be found in an extent of space.

The idea that atoms are mostly "empty space" is, from a quantum viewpoint, nonsense. The volume of an atom is filled by the wavefunctions of its electrons, or, from a QFT viewpoint, there is a localized excitation of the electron field in that region of space, which are both very different from the "empty" vacuum state.

The concept of empty space is actually quite tricky, since our intuition "Space is empty when there is no particle in it" differs from the formal "Empty space is the unexcited vacuum state of the theory" quite a lot. The space around the atom is definitely not in the vacuum state, it is filled with electron states. But if you go and look, chances are, you will find at least some "empty" space in the sense of "no particles during measurement". Yet you are not justified in saying that there is "mostly empty space" around the atom, since the electrons are not that sharply localized unless some interaction (like measurements) takes place that actually force them to. When not interacting, their states are "smeared out" over the atom in something sometimes called the electron cloud, where the cloud or orbital represents the probability of finding a particle in any given spot." Source: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/126512/why-doesnt-matter-pass-through-other-matter-if-atoms-are-99-999-empty-space



Psychologically, we are gods of our subjective experience. We experience reality through our senses. To an individual, reality is what the mind believes is real.

This post was edited by NatureNames on Sep 19 2015 03:14am

Did you also learn this on a pop sci video? This is why you are so confused about fusion reactors. You have no idea what you're talking about

but are any of us really here?

it's not "empty" if i smash your face i guess you will understand what im talking about.

You are the God of empty space in your head.