Nothingness
Travels
Space is mostly made of nothing. When one would zoom in, through multiple layers of magnification, we would find how extraordinary our existance is. First we would see organisms, followed by its organs and then the individual cells that make up those organs. But this is far from the limit. When going even deeper we would find the single DNA strands and the atoms that make up those strands.
We cannot see anything at this point, light does not function at this level. However, light -or the lack thereof- does not stop us from diving even deeper. When we get closer to the atom we find nothing. Atoms are a cloud where electrons might be, with in the center the nucleus. This nucleus consists of protons and neutrons.
You may be tempted to think it ends here, and you would have a point. In schools students get thaught that there is nothing smaller than protons or neutrons. This does not end up being the case. These particles are in itself made up of quarks, or rather, a lot of quarks appearing and averaging out to three quarks. The general concensus in the science communities is that quarks are fundamental particles, they are not made up smaller particles, they just are.
Altough it may seem this is it, this is the pixel of the universe we can go even further. Travelling almost as many orders of magnitude further as we already did, we find nothing. This nothing, yet this is everything. At this scale, the Planck length, there is nothing to observe. Nevertheless, it would be fundamentally impossible to measure anything smaller than this.
Were we to do the opposite of this, we go right back up to a life sized scale and then we would go bigger. This will lead us onto a different, but surprisingly similar journey. Starting with a house, perhaps your house, we could easily see man-made structures. Going bigger, we see neighbourhoods, towns, cities. Then it starts to fade again. The cities become indistinguishable from the surrounding nature, only the light it produces is left.
This will leave us at the scale of the earth, but why stop there. We can zoom out to see the moon and this is the zone humans have always been in. Not a single person ever left this. This is still far from the end though, eventhough we can see light move instead of an instantaneous flash, we could bring the entire solar system into view. This would be followed by nothing. To see the closest star, we would need to take a big jump. When doing so, all sense of structure and matter would be lost. Everything we consider home, has become a tiny speck of light. All solarsystems would be a speck of light.
An illusion of structure forms again when zooming out even more: galaxies. Although made up of mostly empty space, on this scale it might be perceived a structure. This would be lost almost immediately again when it too becomes nothing more than lonely firefly in the night sky. The last "thing" we encounter are the galactic fillaments. Then, the end of the observable universe.
Emptiness
In the big picture of the universe, the concept of space and matter is extremely fascinating. When looking at the vast expanse of the cosmos, it shows that a significant portion is empty. Around eighty percent of space, as far as we know today. Everything that exists is just a really small speck in this void. This idea of emptiness extends all the way down to the subatomic level. The atom itself is just a really small nucleus surrounded by a cloud of extremely small electrons. Even the nucleus is not solid. It in itself is mostly devoid of anything, only consisting of fundamental particles called quarks that average out to three.
This notion might lead to some profound philosophical and existential thoughts. Questions like "Is life real?" or "Does anything truly exist?" emerge from the extreme contrast between the experience we have with our world and the underlying emptiness that physics reveals. Our mind is not wired to process and handle these concepts. When we philosophize about this, the saying "I think therefore I am" might be more applicable than anywhere else. Essentially we are nothing more than illusions of our own brain. All of our thinking is only the product of chemical reactions all throughout our bodies.
If you liked this article, you probably dislike your sanity. Personally I really like to sometimes let my mind wander and "discover" new thoughts. My existential crises do come from those "brainwaves".
As with all thoughts, prejudices and everything we do it is based on all of our prior experiences. Therefor, this I should cite my sources. The first part is pretty heavily based on a video by CGP Gray. In this video he makes a journey through all scales, from the Planck length all the way up to the edges of the observable universe.