Hold out your hand, palm up. Now, imagine there’s a solitary peanut nestled in the center of your hand. You’re just holding it there, looking at it and thinking about how small it is.

Keeping the imaginary peanut in your mind, now picture that you are standing on second base at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Lift your gaze from the lone peanut and allow it to play over the expanse of the field around you. Tilt your head up just a little bit and take in the tens of thousands of seats arrayed around the circumference of the playing surface. Go ahead. Indulge yourself and pretend the seats are full of adoring fans, cheering your skillful supporting of a single legume. It’s a big place. Look back at the peanut. It’s so small in comparison, but it’s part of the scenery.

Now imagine that everything disappears except the peanut and a grain of sand sitting behind the last row of seats in center field. What you have now in your mind’s eye is a rough scale model of a hydrogen atom. The peanut is the nucleus. The grain of sand is the single electron orbiting the nucleus. With everything else out of the picture, all that remains are three things:

1. A peanut
2. A grain of sand
3. An enormous amount of empty space

While your imagination is still whirring along at high RPMs, toss this in the hopper. You, and everyone and everything around you, are composed of atoms much like the one occupying your thoughts at this very moment. That means that no matter how solid you might feel or how incredibly dense the steps feel against your shin when you trip going up the staircase, you (and the staircase) are mostly empty space. Not just mostly – almost entirely.

Literally 99.9999999% of your body is comprised of empty spaces around atomic nuclei. Granted, those spaces are extraordinarily tiny, but they are spaces, nonetheless. Everything is bound together by the mysterious and omnipresent “strong force” at the center of every atom and the gravitational forces that every mass, no matter how small, exerts on every other mass in the universe. Without these forces, everything would fall apart, perceived solidity giving way to the chaos of space littered with tiny fragments of subatomic matter bouncing around aimlessly and without form.

Lucky for us, those aforementioned forces do exist – and they play by predictable rules, many of which scientists are still working to figure out.

This article was written by Tilmer Wright, Jr. Tilmer is an IT professional with over thirty years of experience wrestling with technology and a proud member of the Authors Guild of Tennessee. In his spare time, he writes books. His second novel, The Bit Dance is a cautionary tale about what can happen when technology runs away from its creators. You can find links to Tilmer’s books at the following location: https://www.amazon.com/Tilmer-Wright/e/B00DVKGG4K%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_s…

His author information web site is here: http://www.tilmerwrightjr.com/