The Mind-Boggling Emptiness Within Even the Hardest Things!

Alright, so you know how a diamond is one of the hardest, most unyielding materials on Earth, right? You can’t crush it with your bare hands, it feels incredibly solid, dense, and, well, there.

But here’s a little secret that’ll make you look at everything around you—and even yourself—a bit differently: even that super-solid diamond is almost entirely empty space!

I know, right? It sounds wild. When you hold a sparkling diamond in your hand, you’re experiencing something that’s roughly 99.9999999% empty space. Think about that for a second! It’s not just diamonds, either; it’s everything made of matter: your desk, your cup of coffee, the air you breathe, and yes, you!

Here’s why: Everything is made up of atoms, and atoms themselves are mostly empty space. You’ve got a tiny, incredibly dense nucleus in the center, and then electrons whizzing around it in a huge, vast (relatively speaking) area. If you imagine an atom as a football stadium, the nucleus would be like a tiny pea in the very center of the field, and the electrons would be like tiny dust motes buzzing around the very highest seats. Most of what’s between the pea and the dust motes? Absolutely nothing!

It’s the electromagnetic forces between these tiny, fast-moving electrons that give matter its solid feel and prevent things from passing through each other. So, if we were somehow able to remove all that empty space from, say, every atom in your body, you’d shrink down to a size smaller than a grain of sand, yet you’d still weigh exactly the same! Pretty wild to think that we’re all just incredibly sparse collections of energy held together by invisible forces, isn’t it? It definitely makes you ponder what ‘solid’ really means!