The strange physics of why “touch” is mostly an illusion.
By: Josh Adler
Touch feels direct. Immediate. Real.
You press your hand to the table. You feel the texture. The pressure. The resistance.
But here’s the strange part: you’re not actually touching it.
Not at the atomic level. Not in any literal sense.
Because the atoms in your hand never truly connect with the atoms in the table.
What you’re feeling is… repulsion.
Atoms Are Mostly Empty Space
Start here: you are made of atoms.
Everything is.
But atoms are 99.9999999% empty space.
They’re tiny nuclei surrounded by clouds of electrons — and when two atoms get “close,” those electron clouds push against each other like invisible force fields.
So what you feel when you “touch” something isn’t contact.
It’s the electromagnetic force pushing back.
You are always floating.
Always hovering.
Always almost-there.
So What Are We Actually Feeling?
Touch is just your nervous system interpreting pressure — how close your atoms are getting to other atoms before being pushed away.
That pressure gets translated into electrical signals, which your brain maps as sensation: soft, sharp, warm, smooth.
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But there is no actual merging.
No fusing.
No literal contact.
Just resistance.
You’ve Never Sat in a Chair
You’ve hovered on a molecular cushion.
You’ve floated just far enough above it that electromagnetic forces said,
“That’s close enough.”
And your brain interpreted it as sitting.
Everything you’ve ever touched, held, kissed, smashed, or sat on?
You didn’t actually “touch” it.
You just got really close — close enough for your atoms to say “no further.”
Why This Actually Matters
It’s easy to write this off as just weird science trivia.
But it says something deeper about our relationship with reality.
So much of our experience is interpretation.
Not direct access to the world — but filtered, translated, repackaged sensation.
Our most basic human experiences — touch, memory, emotion — are simulations stitched together in the brain.
That doesn’t make them less real.
It just makes reality more strange than we thought.
If You’re Still With Me…
You’ve never truly touched anything.
And yet, your whole life is built on the illusion that you have.
Maybe that’s what most of reality is:
A beautifully consistent set of illusions — just real enough to build a life on.
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Josh Adler blog, you’ve never touched anything, atoms don’t touch, electromagnetic repulsion, weird physics facts, illusion of touch, quantum weirdness, Josh Adler curiosity, perception and reality, atomic force fields