Think of heat transfer. Conduction, surfaces are in contact. Convection, a fluid medium is in contact. And radiation, what's that medium? How does heat from the sun warm the earth, with no medium in between?

If nature has a mind, it's not a good one. The medium for radiation is nature's ability to speed up and slow down it's clock. Just like an inflated tire will always find the leak, nature's always going to take the easiest way. Not having a mind, or having the worst mind possible, means you're going to do anything to take the easy route. This is special relativity. The tendency is to elevate spacetime to something mystical. Instead, you need to go lower, blur and know no distinction between frequency and intensity.

Coupled with the photoelectric effect of radiation hitting the entire object and not just a point of focus, and Brownian movements driving increasing entropy, meaning atoms exist but there's nothing really special on their boundary, you have a general principle. The object is in a bath of radiation particles acting everywhere. Brightness equates to an internal clock ticking fast. For every geometry with a specific boundary, there's a thermal topology just skimming the surface, that of infinite thermal dimensions. Hopefully that helps with Hilbert spaces.

Because this principle acts anywhere and everywhere, nature "goes to the tape" and will even change the record, everything around it faster than you can look at it, if that's the path of least effort.

How we get to atoms: Prior to Planck and Einstein, Newton's medium of radiation was just temperatures really close together. Under Newton's model, a closed closet full of cast iron pots and pans would end up with one burning bright hot, hot enough to swallow the sun, and everything else turning into black holes. Planck fixed this by saying if something is to exist, it has a capacity to absorb heat before it starts radiating it out. Using the speed of light, which goes back to Galileo, and the kinetic theory of gases which relates temperature to dimensionless probability, you have a limit on how small something to be. It's incredibly small, bringing the photon to a cosmic level if the Planck length is the size of a photon.

So particles aren't intuitive, not little grains of sand to build things out of. Anything with a discrete start and an end works even if it's purely thermal relating to an internal voltage on the medium of clock speed.

What makes an atom? They're always the same despite weight or lattice or grains. Any smaller means lightening's shooting out. Instead of counting what's inside or measuring all points of contact, just use that radiation topology to describe, or even define it completely. Likely nature is what does this.

Why this matters:

What if the holographic universe theory is right, and through technology we lower that distance to around the sun or even the earth?

What if string theory is right, and we increase the effective size of the string to the earth or the sun?

What would that look like?

Instruments inside the sun, whose orbit is a galactic one. If that is a matter wave that's following that orbit, and the other side of the interference pattern is the boundary of a black hole, that looks a lot like dark matter. Control that with another larger black hole, and another "data ground" to a therapeutic imaging machine, how could a tumor evade that? Dump more tech into that concept, get it big enough to microwave an incoming asteroid, humans are invincible on a cosmic scale.