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?

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”

The implication of claims like Eddington’s is that familiar objects are in some significant sense illusory, but how could that be? The philosopher Susan Stebbing critiques Eddington by noting that whenever we make the claim that some object is real, we do so in contrast to some illusory object, like an artificial apple: “It is quite sensible to contrast this ingenious fake with a ‘real’ apple, for a ‘real’ apple just is an object that really is an apple and not only seems to be one”.2 [2]Unlike with artificial apples, it is misleading to claim that familiar tables are illusions. One could, sensibly, claim that some specific table has illusory properties – say it was coated in the highly light-absorbing material Vantablack and so its contours were obscured – but it is meaningless to claim that all tables and, worse, that all familiar objects aren’t real.

1 – Illusory properties: wrinkled aluminium foil with a portion ­– equally wrinkled –  coated in Vantablack3

[It is, therefore, an error to claim that we are radically mistaken about the properties of everyday objects. When I claim that my chair is solid, I am surely right, as long as it continues to support my weight and prevent my falling through it. Likewise, in the absence of hallucinations or optical illusions I can be very confident in correctly discerning the colour of the objects around me.

I am opposing the view that the world deceives us as to the true properties of familiar objects and that much of what we think we observe are illusions, that my chair is really neither solid nor brown. Let’s call advocates of this view ‘Illusionists’.