rpenner

It is irrelevant to a fact-based discussion what you think. 1) There is not enough context from that clip to know what he is saying. He qualified the ambiguous word "world" with two adjectives so you don't know which thing or concept he is saying does not exist on the basis of that quote. 2) The speaker was not a scientist in the specific field under discussion, so his opinion is at best a second-hand interpretation of the ideas of others and at worst nonsense. This particular author had a history of filling books with nonsense -- he was a novelist who made a hit with the absurd. 3) The most likely interpretation consistent with science is that he is saying that "solid" or "continuous" matter is an illusion because atoms are much larger than their constituent parts therefore are mostly space devoid of matter. A pop physics source like this might even go as far to say atoms are mostly "empty space" but that is not the view of quantum field theory, which lets us calculate ab initio how resistant such atoms are to crushing, for example. So atoms are not mysterious to science, but so well understood by quantum field theory that we can calculate how chemicals react, not based on centuries of rules of thumb, but via calculation of the behavior of electrons. 4) We are not ephemeral quantum fluctuations. Planck's constant places a limit on how long quantum fluctuations last. Since Planck's constant is at the indispensable core of all quantum theories, it appears wherever you got this idea was a source devoid of the least bit of interest in teaching the science of quantum physics. Thus you have had bad teachers miseducate you.

The quote is not from any scientist, but from the late author Robert Anton Wilson. He had a Ph.D. from an unaccredited school in psychology, not physics. He died in 2006. The video was posted circa 2010. The context was removed in the middle of the first sentence as is fairly common in bafflegab. [01:18] Robert Anton Wilson: ... out of millions and millions of blobs of energy and light, photons and electrons ... they make up this imaginary three-dimensional solid world, which does not exist at all according to Relativity or Quantum Mechanics.