The popular view that physics has shown everyday reality to be an illusion is deeply flawed. Understanding how macroscopic phenomena emerge helps dispel this myth, writes Alexander Franklin. 

Popular science often tells us that we are radically deceived by the commonplace appearance of everyday objects and that colour and solidity are illusions. For instance, the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington distinguished in 1928 between two tables: the familiar table and the scientific table, while the former is solid and coloured, the scientific table “is nearly all empty space”. Eddington then makes the striking claim that “modern physics has by delicate test and remorseless logic assured me that my second scientific table is the only one which is really there”.1

^[1]The idea that everyday objects are not really there is, of course, nonsense! There are few claims of which I am more certain than that the chair on which I’m currently seated is solid and brown.

The contradiction between these two sets of views prompts two questions, which we’ll explore in this article: why do some thinkers claim that we are radically deceived about everyday reality? And, given that they are mistaken, how is it that the nature of the objects that we can see and touch emerges from the very unfamiliar particles that make them up?