Does your fist exist?

Make a fist. Look at it; surely there’s a fist in front of you. Now open your hand. The fist is gone. What happened? The particles are the exact same, but their arrangement slightly changed. At some point between open and closed, your fist disappeared.

Or, “it” was never there to begin with.

This brings up another crucial problem. Let’s assume that you’re trying to argue the following is true: objects take up space. We also know:

a ) that object is made up of particles, and
b ) those particles also take up space.

So the question is this: does an object occupy the exact same space as the particles which make it up?

Either way you answer – yes or no – creates difficult problems.

Let’s say the answer is yes: objects occupy the exact same space as the particles which constitute them. This implies that every object has an exact number of particles. When that number changes, the object changes. When your chair gets a scratch, it would no longer remain the same chair, as it lost some constituent particles. It would become a chair-with-a-scratch. Even if you gently rubbed the chair, microscopic particles would be removed, and its metaphysical existence would change again. That means a practically infinite number of objects exist, and they are constantly popping in and out of existence with the slightest breeze. In fact, no concrete “object” would ever exist for more than an instant, as atoms are constantly bumping into each other. This scenario is logically possible, but it strikes me as utterly absurd and unnecessary.

So then we’re left with the answer being no: objects do not occupy the exact same space as the particles which constitute them. But this might even be more peculiar. What would a chair occupy space with, if not particles? Pure chair-ness? Concrete space, not filled by particles, but filled with some kind of non-particle-spatial-stuff. I can’t even imagine what that stuff would be.

This would also imply that the particles are unnecessary, and we could remove them without changing the chair at all. Take a chair, remove the physical particles, and you’re still left with a chair. But this is preposterous! I am unwilling to posit the existence of ghost-chairs. Surely, if we throw the chair into a fire and let it burn to ashes, it doesn’t remain a chair any longer, and it doesn’t take up space.

The only resolution is to say that objects do not take up space – they are not physical.

No. Are you seriously telling me that you understand quantum physics?
You better call someone.

1. That is not evidence "objects take up space" - most of matter is empty space, as deduced by the Rutherford experiment. This is actually evidence for the electromagnetic force.

2. In the most general case, when objects change state, their various energy levels change. At the quantum level, these changes are discrete (ie, in "chunks" or steps) and encompass thugs like spin and angular momentum. In the classical (ie. macroscopic) regime, most properties are on a continuous spectrum - liquid water molecules can have a wide range of kinetic energies. "Object" is somewhat loosely-defined, but water certainly doesn't change property through loss/gain of atoms. If water somehow "lost" an atom, it would simply cease to be called water. At the chemical level, pretty much all the properties of water relate to how the electrons behave.

You said it.

How much of the big picture do you think that is exactly?

Sometimes I want to go back in time and punch myself in the face.

But someone tomorrow told me that time travel would involve special relativity, which might or might not be relative to this thread.

Isn't Schrodinger's cat a failed attempt to disprove quantum theory that's disproven by the Copenhagen interpretation.

And better explained by the Uncertainity Principle, that the problem of measuring anything on a quantum scale is that what ever you use to detect the particle, will have to interact with the particle (hence you can either know where it is, or how fast its going, but never both - not because of the act of observation, but that observation on a quantum scale requires that you cause a reaction - i.e. in order to measure a quantum particle, you have to 'hit it' with another particle to 'observe it' (its not like measurement on a relative scale). Any attempt to measure something so fundamentally small, will alter its state. Where as you can place a tape measure on a brick with no worry.

Economies of scale in variables or something like that.

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
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