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You're 99.9999999% empty space — so why can't you walk through walls?
💡 Matter is almost entirely empty space, and what feels "solid" is electrons repelling electrons — not atoms actually touching.
Almost everything you consider "solid" is overwhelmingly nothing. An atom is made of a dense nucleus surrounded by a vast, mostly empty region where its electrons live. The catch is the scale: if an atom were blown up to the size of a football stadium, the nucleus — which holds over 99.9% of the atom's mass — would be a single pea sitting at the center. Everything between that pea and the top row of seats is essentially void.
So why does a wall stop your hand? Not because atoms are "packed solid" — they aren't. When you push against a surface, the electrons in your hand's atoms get close to the electrons in the wall's atoms, and like charges repel. That electromagnetic push-back (reinforced by a quantum rule that forbids electrons from piling into the same state) is what you feel as solidity. You never actually touch anything; you feel force fields shoving back.
This means the sensation of a tabletop, a handshake, or a punch is really the interaction of electric fields, not matter physically colliding. Solid objects are less like bricks and more like swarms of repelling charges holding their shape.