Nothing….

I’m try to get my mind around the concept of ‘nothing’.

It’s tricker than you think.

Philosophers and scientists have long debated whether nothing or nothingness is even possible and if it is, what actually is it? I read somewhere that nothing must be without aspect or property. Whether it is size, shape, mass, energy, forces. No time, no past, no present, no future. And no existence. That makes logical sense and carries the veneer of the possible. But many philosophers had a different perspective.

Pythagoras through his beliefs, advocated for nothing being an illusion. He was convinced the physical world we experience is not reality. It was secondary to the mathematical order underlying it reflecting an unchanging foundation. Parmenides the 5th Century Greek philosopher argued that nothing cannot exist because we have a name for it. That is if we speak about it, it must subsist whether now or in the past.

Aristotle also did not believe nothing or emptiness existed. He attempted to differentiate between matter and space but identified space as a place that was not empty (‘Nature abhors a vacuum’). He conceived the idea that space (and the heavens) was filled with an inert substance called Aether which he descried as divine. It took until Newton and Einstein before the concept of Aether was fully discarded. Kant suggested we cannot truly know ‘nothing’ because all of our knowledge is grounded in experience and nothing cannot be experienced.

In the 17th Century, classical physics via an Italian scientist by the name of Torriceli proved the actuality of vacuums. A vacuum is typically defined as a space devoid of matter, or more basically what is left when you remove absolutely everything you can. So in effect leaving — nothing. But for many, it still did not put the existence of nothing to rest. The counter argument to a vacuum being perfect emptiness was the ability of light to traverse through. It was thought light needed a conduit to do so.

In the 19th century, James Maxwell proposed that light was an electromagnetic wave and did not require a medium to travel. He suggested a calculation for the speed of light in a vacuum. But it then gets a little blurry. Einstein through his theory of General Relativity postulated that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant as there is no matter to slow light down. However the theory didn’t conclude a vacuum is empty; gravitational effects and potentially dark energy resides (the later a type of energy which we are yet to demonstrate exists or truly understand). As an aside, today we know of light behaving as both a wave and particles.

Today, quantum theory has also crashed the party. In a quantum world absolute stillness or zero energy does not exist. A vacuum is believed to have traces of energy as it is filled with fields that create particles that appear and disappear. This is underpinned by the Heisenberg (uncertainty) principle which states that we cannot know simultaneously the speed and position (or energy and time) of a particle such as an electron with perfect accuracy. A vacuum which is thought to be the poster boy of nothing, could for extremely short times have highly uncertain levels of energy as these particles pop in and out in a perpetual state of change.

What do we take away from the science? That our understanding of nature is limited, foggy. It has a fuzziness we are trying to comprehend and in truth surprises us even when we think we do.

And where does that leave us with nothing? It seems we cannot say in scientific terms whether nothing is possible and philosophical perspectives…..well they offer reasoning from multiple fronts. But let’s take a step back. Perhaps I am making this overly complex and taking the concept too literally by considering nothing as a noun. Perhaps I should be thinking about it as a state; a way of being. Because ‘nothing’ feels like an important idea. We use the word both flippantly and meaningfully. It pervades much of our thought processes obviously and sub consciously. The abstraction of nothing allows us to switch off, pause, to consider absence and the what next. Ideas can emerge from nothing; accepting what isn’t present can help us contemplate what is. Nothing offers potential. A necessary notion intertwining our lives and integral to developing creatively, scientifically, humanly.

Where do you stand on nothing or do you think it is part of life’s great illusion?