Paper · Philosophy
Gautam Devaraju
MSc Neuroscience, ELTE
8 min read
The Architecture of Emptiness
Structural Realism and the Search for Fundamental Reality
Every time you pick up a coffee mug, type on a keyboard, or lean against a wall, the world feels undeniably solid.
Yet the physics of those everyday moments tells a quieter story. At the atomic level, everyday objects are almost entirely empty space. The resistance you feel against your fingers isn't a hard physical collision. It is just the electrons in the object pushing back against the electrons in your hand.
We experience this subtle magnetic resistance as touch.
It is a simple fact of how our world works, but it leaves us with a surprisingly difficult question: if nothing is truly solid, what is everything actually made of?