Explore. The third table
One table, with a cup of tea on it in the light from a window. Look further down into it, from the table Eddington leaned on to the one a carpenter made in a world someone designed, and lift the cup at any depth.
Each deeper description of what tables are made of has taken its place beneath the earlier ones, so that the same object now has a familiar face, an atomic anatomy, and a foundation in quantum fields, and no one supposes that the newest description cancels the oldest.
Look further down
The first table
The first table was the one he had known all his life. It took up space, it stayed where it was put, it had a color, and it was solid in the plain sense that a man could lean his weight on it.
The second table
It consisted almost entirely of empty space, crossed by a thin scattering of electric charges moving at enormous speeds, and the charges taken together occupied a vanishingly small fraction of the volume the table appeared to fill.
Chapter 1, The Third Table, ¶ 1
When he laid a sheet of paper on it, the charges in the wood kept up a ceaseless bombardment against the charges in the paper, and the sheet rode on that bombardment at an almost constant height, held aloft the way a shuttlecock is kept in the air by repeated strokes from below.
Chapter 1, The Third Table, ¶ 1
Physics had discovered what the solidity of the table consists of. That discovery explained the familiar table and left it standing.
Quantum fields
The charges Eddington imagined as small hard particles turned out to be excitations of quantum fields, entities without edges that resist most attempts to picture them, and the fields in turn may be the large-scale face of something stranger still.
The third table
Imagine now a third table. It stands in a room in a world that someone designed.
Chapter 1, The Third Table, ¶ 4
Beneath that lies a level they may never reach, where the laws governing their particles are carried out as operations in a computational substrate built in the world the designer comes from.
The cup and the ring
The woman who made the third table sets a cup of tea on it. The cup stays where she put it.
Chapter 1, The Third Table, ¶ 5
When she lifts the cup, a pale ring remains on the wood, and her friend, who is sitting across from her, sees the ring as well and wipes it away with his sleeve.
Chapter 1, The Third Table, ¶ 5
In every respect that Stebbing identified as the meaning of solidity, her table is solid.
Chapter 1, The Third Table, ¶ 5
What has changed for her lies behind the table instead of within it.
How the picture is drawn
The drawing is this page’s, and so are the forms it gives the deeper descriptions. Charges appear as points far larger and far fewer than they are, fields as soft shading that moves, and the level beneath the fields as a grid of switching cells, since no one knows what the machine beneath a designed world would be like. At every depth the cup stands in the same place, and lifting it leaves the same ring, drawn in that depth’s own terms.