What’s Really Between Atoms by Richard Feynman

What’s Really Between Atoms by Richard Feynman

Try to imagine nothing — absolute nothing: no air, no light, no particles, no stuff of any kind. Just pure emptiness.

You think you can imagine it: you picture blackness or void. But even that blackness is something. Even imagining empty space means you’re imagining space — and space turns out to be very much something. This is where intuition fails.

So here’s the question: What’s between atoms?

In school you learned that everything is made of atoms, like little solid balls packed together. But they’re not packed together. They’re not even close. There’s enormous space between them relative to their size. Most people assume that space is empty — a void. But that’s wrong.

Between every atom in your body, in this room, and everywhere else, something exists — something physical that carries energy, exerts force, and holds the universe together.

Put your hand on a table. You feel solidity — the sense that your hand touched the table. But the atoms in your hand never actually touch the atoms in the table. They never make contact.

Atoms are surrounded by electrons: tiny negatively charged particles buzzing around the nucleus. When your hand gets near the table, the electrons in your hand approach the electrons in the table. Like charges repel — they push away from one another. They refuse to occupy the same space. That electromagnetic repulsion is what your brain interprets as solidity, as touch, as contact. But there’s always a gap — a cushion of electric force. You’re actually hovering above the table, suspended by fields pushing against fields.

So what fills the space between atoms?

It’s electric and electromagnetic fields. These fields are real. They exist in space, they carry energy, they have momentum, and they do things. Every charged particle — every electron, every proton — creates an electric field extending outward in all directions. In principle, the electric field from an electron in your fingertip extends across the entire universe.

Atoms aren’t isolated little balls in nothing. They are centers of fields that spread outward and overlap and interact. When we look at matter, what we see is really a dense web of overlapping fields: electrons repelling electrons, creating the illusion of solidity, all through electromagnetic force.

The “stuff” is not just atoms — the “stuff” is the field.

But that’s not even the strangest part. What if you remove all the atoms — every single atom — from a region of space? You pump out matter, leaving a perfect vacuum: empty means nothing, right?

Physics says you’re wrong. Nature absolutely refuses to be empty.

According to quantum mechanics, particularly the uncertainty principle, you cannot have a region of space with exactly zero energy for any period of time. Perfect emptiness would require perfect precision — exactly zero energy — and quantum mechanics forbids that. Space itself cannot be still. It fluctuates.

In a perfect vacuum, pairs of particles and antiparticles spontaneously appear and disappear. These are called virtual particles. They exist only for an incredibly brief moment before annihilating each other, but they have real, measurable effects — such as the Casimir effect, where two neutral metal plates in a vacuum attract each other because of quantum fluctuations in the space between them.

This means the vacuum isn’t a passive void. It’s active — full of energy, pressure, and activity.

So, between atoms isn’t “nothing.” It’s fields and quantum fluctuations filling every point in space.

Particles aren’t tiny solid balls sitting in empty space. A particle is a ripple in a field — a place where the field is vibrating more intensely. The electron, for example, isn’t an object riding in a field. It is the electromagnetic field in a concentrated state.

And these fields are everywhere: from here to the moon, between galaxies, and beyond. The electromagnetic field in your body is the same field that stretches across the cosmos. It’s continuous and unbroken.

So what are you — really?
You are atoms, yes — but those atoms are mostly empty space filled with fields. You are patterns of fields and fluctuations. The space in your body and the space between stars are made of the same fundamental fabric: fields everywhere, always something happening.

There is no true emptiness anywhere in the universe. Reality isn’t made of “stuff and void.” It’s made of activity, of field interactions, of patterns in motion.

That’s what’s between the atoms.
That’s what connects everything.

Once you truly grasp that, reality stops being objects in empty space — and becomes a web of interacting influence and perpetual activity.