You don't have furniture

Dust forms through the progressive degradation of the solids around us. It's an uncomfortable reminder of a microscopic world that not only exists all around us, but interacts with the more familiar macroscopic.

In my scientific education, the idea that has changed my perspective on the world around me most profoundly might have been my introductory materials science course I took in my first year of university. It was quite cursory, of course, but it made me realise that the world around me was this endless flux of atoms and structure. A steel rod is not "merely" made of steel. It is steel atoms arranged in an astoundingly complex arrangement of structure upon structure upon microstructure.

It was a moment that psychologists might call an "accommodation": The expansion of one's internal model of reality to accommodate new information that cannot fit within one's existing models. I live for those moments. Moments when you realise that you've been taking an idea for granted, an idea that in truth merits closer inspection, and you perform that closer inspection and you become a bigger person for it.

I suppose the thing I'd been taking for granted was solidness; rigidity; what it meant for an object to be an object; or perhaps even thingness, the fact of being a single unified entity. A cup is a cup, and I move that whole cup around when I move it. But in fact, it isn't. Rigidity is a concept that exists only at a particular scale of size and stiffness. Try to pick up a metal sheet a hundred metres across, or to grab water as if it were solid, and the concept breaks down.

I think this is quite a common learning obstacle in physics education. On physics question-answer forums, I can't count the number of confusions I've seen about reference frames, which goes something like this -- "if I'm in a train, I'm in its reference frame; but if I leave it, at what point do I leave the reference frame?" A question that I'm certain anyone who has studied physics has had to ask themselves. Of course, the answer is that the reference frame has nothing to do with the train's geometric boundaries. It's not a thing you can be "in" or "out" of, the way you can be in or out of a room.

In a similar vein, the "what if I have a rod a lightyear across and push one end of it?" The expectation is that the far end of the rod should immediately begin to move in response to the push, and it stems from a conceptualisation of the rod as One Thing, with its associated concepts of indivisibility and rigidity.

These are all questions I've asked myself at some point in my education, and found partially satisfactory answers to, but it wasn't until that moment of accommodation during some first-year Materials Science uni lecture that it all clicked together. It was a Matrix moment: "There is no spoon." Indeed, there is no rod, there is no train, and there is no cup. There are only atoms and void.

Dust. It arises from the progressive degradation of the solid matter in our environment. (Is it an inevitable consequence of the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Indeed, to free up material from its rigid confinement in a solid material structure is to allow its degrees of freedom to move more independently than when it was in it. So it has more entropy, or at least, the potential for more entropy. A pile of sand has more entropy than a chunk of quartzite.)

Have you ever noticed your clothes getting a little threadbare, or the patterns printed upon it degrading? Where did the threads of your once threadplenty favourite T-shirt go? They were pulverised. Perhaps not entire threads, perhaps only the exterior layers of the threads still holding onto self-contained Thingness, but pulverised, turned to dust on the counter, lint in the lint trap, dust mite breakfast! (Or is it? Do dust mites eat fabric shreds? Unsure.)

The thingness of the things around us is an illusion. You don't have furniture. There are atoms, and you think they are furniture. The exterior layers of the wood of your shelf is incessantly sloughing off into the entropic soup we unknowingly bathe in. With every scratch, every nick, every blemish, particles of lignin are shredded and thrust into the air, where they will roll around and degrade into chaotic strands of polymers, and from there through biological or chemical processes broken into their constituent sugars and back out into the ecological and geological cycles of the Earth.

...

I don't like dust. I'm allergic.

I should get back to dusting.