You Never Really Touch Anything — And Sound Proves It

Here’s a weird thought: when you touch something — your phone, a mug of tea, or even another person — you’re not actually touching it at all.

It feels like you are. But according to quantum physics, what you’re experiencing is just the invisible force of repulsion between your atoms and the object’s atoms. Like two magnets pushing against each other, your electrons never quite make contact. It’s all down to electromagnetic force doing the work.

So that comforting feeling of warm skin, or the solid sense of the ground beneath your feet? It’s more of a carefully constructed illusion created by your nervous system than actual physical connection.

Now, let’s bring sound into this.

Sound is vibration — movement through air, water, or solid objects. But just like touch, you’re not really “hearing” sound in the way you might think. Your ear doesn’t grab onto waves and drag them in. Instead, vibrating air molecules cause tiny hairs inside your ear to move, sending electrical signals to your brain. And here’s the twist — those air molecules don’t travel from the source to your ear. They just bump into the next one, and the next, like a chain reaction. It’s energy passing through space, not substance.

You could say sound is the perfect example of connection without contact. It moves through a room, touches your body, shifts your emotions — all without actually touching you.

This is part of why sound therapy works so well for some people. Vibrations from gongs, singing bowls or overtone singing can be felt in the body, even though the sound never actually “touches” you. It reminds us that we’re all suspended in this invisible web of energy and frequency — where force and motion create feeling without ever needing to collide.

In a world where nothing really touches, maybe what we feel becomes even more important.

And maybe sound is the language of this strange reality — a reminder that we’re connected, not by contact, but by resonance.