This sculpture is exactly the size of a standard brick as used in the United States:   8" x 4" x 2.25"

Can one use them to build a world?

In 1911, the British scientist Ernest Rutherford announced that an atom is mostly empty space. About 99.9% of the atom's mass is in the tiny nucleus. In this view, even the nucleus is mostly empty space and most of its mass is due to the quarks that make up its protons and neutrons.  And God only knows what quarks are made out of.  It would seem that our cotton candy world is ultimately made out of layers and layers of nothing.

Scholarly publications in science, economics and politics always cite a lot of other papers to justify the facts stated in them.  These cited papers in turn cite other papers and so on down the line.  At the bottom of the chain of citations and references there may be publications that are just rumor or things that people with an agenda made up out of thin air.  Is it possible that there are widely respected think tanks which rest on such dubious foundations?  Again layers and layers of nothing.

Actually the situation with atoms is considerably more complicated than Rutherford imagined.  In fact, a view somewhat closer to the truth is that an atom is a cloud of electrons, and because of mutual repulsion of these electron clouds, atoms have a real and tangible volume.

The glue that holds the physical world together and gives it substance is the array of forces–electromagnetism and so on–that physicists have discovered since the time of Rutherford.

In a vaguely analogous way, society is not so much based on ultimate truth as it is on mutual trust.  This is the social contract.  It is the social contract that holds societies and nations together.

If the forces that bind the atoms together were to vanish, the world would cease to exist. 

And if the social contract breaks down our society will collapse.

Utterly.