Physicists bid farewell to reality?

Nature ^ | 4/18/07 | Philip Ball

[Ethan Clive Osgoode]

When you look at a shiny piece of metal, you’re staring straight into the depths of the Fermi sea.

I'm glad you brought this up. You need many gold atoms before you have a metallic bond and something that has the behavior of gold. Someone can look at one gold atom and be surprised that it's properties and behaviors are not at all like a block of gold. Or one can fantasize: what would this block of gold be like if it behaved just like a big atom of gold... it would be... so...not ductile... hard to imagine... whooo... cue spooky quantum weirdness music.

Gold is made of gold atoms, but gold atoms are not made of gold. In a strictly metaphysical sense, if matter is made of elementary things, elementary things cannot be made of matter. There's no reason to expect non-matter to behave like matter, and there's no reason to be surprised when it does not.