no such thing as water

this npr commentary, in which the physicist adam frank does a very old thing - asserts that physics shows that "there are no solid objects" - really shows an endemic problem with science these days: let's go for the flashiest formulation while displaying the fact that reflecting on our own concepts is not exactly our strong suit. no, physics cannot possibly show that there are no solid objects, for that would entail, for example, that a chair can't actually hold up your butt, alright? now, what it shows, instead, is that solidity is surprising. we might say that it shows that what we meant all along by solidity is not exactly what we thought we meant. but it leaves all the objects in the universe with just the solidity they had before. it doesn't show, for example, that you could pass your hand through a tree after all, though that is quite how it sounds. when we found out water was h2O, we found out something about what we had always meant by 'water', for example, not that there is no such thing as water, right? surely you want to think about science as discovering things about this very world, not as showing that there is no this world after all.