Look around a crowded stadium or a busy city street. You see thousands of people taking up a massive amount of physical space. Now think about the eight billion humans currently living on our planet. We build giant cities and sprawl across continents because we think we need all that room. But the crazy truth is that we are almost entirely made of absolutely nothing.
The actual physical matter that makes up your body is shockingly tiny. If you could somehow magically squeeze all the empty space out of every single person alive today, the entire human race would shrink down to the size of a piece of fruit. You could hold eight billion people in the palm of your hand.
The Secret of Empty Atoms
To understand this bizarre reality, you have to look at the microscopic building blocks of the universe. Everything you see and touch is made of atoms. You were probably taught in school that atoms are solid little balls of matter. But that is actually a massive lie.
Atoms are shockingly hollow. At the very center of an atom is a tiny and ultra dense core called the nucleus. This is where all the actual physical weight is stored. Zooming around the outside of this core is a cloud of electrons. But the distance between the solid core and those electrons is absolutely massive.
If the nucleus was the size of a marble sitting right on the fifty yard line of a professional football stadium, the electrons would be tiny gnats buzzing around the highest seats in the stands. Everything in between the marble and the gnats is literally just empty space.
Squeezing Out the Nothingness
Since you are made of trillions of these hollow atoms, you are also mostly empty space. To be exact, your body is 99.9999999 percent empty. The feeling of physical solidness when you knock on a wooden door or clap your hands is just a clever illusion created by invisible magnetic fields pushing against each other.
Now apply this mind blowing physics concept to the entire human population. There are over eight billion of us walking around on Earth right now. We weigh millions of tons collectively. But if we built a giant magical trash compactor and squeezed every single person until all that empty atomic space was completely gone, the results would be terrifying and fascinating.
The Heaviest Fruit in the Universe
The remaining solid matter of every human on the planet would compress into a tiny sphere. The total volume would literally fit perfectly inside a standard red apple.
But you definitely would not want to try and pick this apple up. Because we only removed the empty space and kept all the actual mass, this tiny piece of fruit would still weigh exactly the same as all eight billion humans combined. It would be so incredibly dense and heavy that it would instantly crush right through the floor and sink straight to the center of the Earth.
This strange thought experiment proves that the universe is far weirder than what we interact with on a daily basis. The giant sprawling world we live in is mostly just an incredibly convincing illusion of solidness built on a foundation of absolute nothing.
References: Symmetry Magazine, Science Alert, Physics.org