Explain - Most of the space in an atom is empty.
Answers
This is a lovely question that needs quite a long answer to explain it, and strikes at the whole idea iof how we relate to the world. It appears that we are not born with our brains as a completely "empty slate" . It seems that we have some inbuilt "models of the world" that are so universal that it is hard to believe that they might just be cultural, ie learned beliefs and behaviours. Anyway, rather than deliberate on the "nature vs nurture" debate, we can look at a little bit of what we know about the way our thinking has changed.
We seem to have a kind of built in model of physics that the mind uses that is based on learning from limited inputs. That is the first point that science has revealed, just how limited the experiential range of biology really is. Life exists in such a narrow window of possibility.
When we discovered glass making we discovered how to bend light, scoping. How to make microscopes and macroscopes, or telescopes as we prefer to refer to them by an engineering characteristic. And we can confirm first hand the reports that an upward change of scale reveals mainly empty space. But the same report from those peering downward is not so publically available. Why not? Well because light itself runs out. The ability of a microscope to resovle an image depends on the very wavelength of light we use, which is finite. In order to get smaller images we need spcialised equipment, or the power of the human mind. Or both. But even an electron microscope will struggle to image the relatively low energy electrons that are stuck into atoms.