The Existence of the Sense of Touch and Timothy Ferris' theory

"It is still a fairly astounding notion to consider that atoms are mostly empty space, and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion. When two objects come together in the real world - billiard balls are often used for an illustration - they don't actually strike each other. 'Rather', as Timothy Ferris explains, 'the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other... were it not for their electrical charges, they could, like galaxies, pass through each other unscathed.' When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (one hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons are implacably opposed to any other closer intimacy." (141)


Bryson (and Ferris) propose an interesting point. If negative forces repel each other, doesn't this theory make sense? Then what really is the sense of touch? How does it really work? How do you know it's actually there? It is this type of thought that makes you doubt basically everything you knew about something so basic as the sense of touch.