Rohan Roberts | 9th Feb 2016
In the last few years there have been three fascinating books (among others) about Nothing. The Mystery of Existence: Why is There Anything at all by John Leslie; A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence Krauss; and the excellent compendium of essays by ‘New Scientist’ magazine, titled, Nothing: From Absolute Zero to Cosmic Oblivion – Amazing Insights into Nothingness.
Philosophers of yore have pontificated about the origins of the universe, the secrets of matter, the reasons for existence, and the nature of Nothing for several millennia. However, as with most intellectual pursuits that were once the preserve of philosophers, Nothing too has moved into the domain of science.
Thinkers have come up with various answers for why we have something and not Nothing: either because Nothing is absurd, or because of the primacy of mind and consciousness, or because of sheer inexplicable luck or chance.
But what do we mean by Nothing? Robert Kuhn considers nothing to include the absence of everything that exists and everything that can exist. This would include, of course, the physical, mental, platonic, spiritual, ultimate creator, and other nonphysical stuff.
What would the absence of physical stuff look like? We’d have no matter or energy or space or time – including the known and unknown laws they go by.
The absence of mental stuff would mean we’d have no consciousness, no awareness, and no awareness of the absence of consciousness.
Plato conceived of earthly reality as being imperfect reflections of a higher purer Reality that consisted of abstract forms and ultimate representations of ideas that are called Platonic Ideals. Nothing would entail the absence of these Platonic ideals as well – including concepts such as numbers, logic, and propositions.
God is often considered a supra-existential entity – outside our temporal and spatial dimensions; an omniscient, omnipotent, supernatural creator of everything. Nothing would include the absence of such an entity as well.
You’d think this was the end of the discussion of what Nothing is. But Robery Kuhn and John Leslie outline an entire taxonomy of opposing kinds of Nothings, in which they deconstruct the nature and content of each layer of Nothing in a hierarchy of Nothings.
So why, indeed, is there Something instead of Nothing? Well, no answer is forthcoming. One may read all the philosophers and thinkers on the subject and all we end up with is vague unsatisfactory suggestions such as Existence is just a hard fact that doesn’t require explanation; or, if something didn’t exist we wouldn’t be here to contemplate the non-existence of something. At any rate, we’re left with a conundrum, a thunk: Can Nothing EXIST? –This is an interesting paradox – to fully resolve it we’d have to invoke Bertrand Russell, the rules of semantics, Frege’s axioms of extentionality – and we’d still not reach anywhere.
Lawrence Krauss, tackles the issue from another angle – as an astrophysicist he takes a cosmological view of the word Nothing to describe the existence of something rather than nothing. In his absolutely gripping and fast-paced book A Universe from Nothing he gives an eloquent and scintillating account from a scientific perspective of how a universe can arise out of nothing – based on our current understanding of quantum physics and cosmology.
When Krauss talks of Nothing, he refers to what we call empty space. He makes the remarkable observation, that if we took a region of space and took away everything from it (all dust, gas, subatomic particles, radiation – absolutely everything from that region of space) then that absolutely empty region of space would still weigh something. (This is another way of understanding Einstein’s Cosmological Constant). The Nothingness of absolutely empty space is, in fact, a “boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop into and out of existence on timescales so short, you never see them.” He goes on to make the case that this same concept applies to the universe. Out of a truly empty void, whole universes could randomly pop into and out of existence, rendering even the fundamental laws of physics accidental. We just happen to live in a universe with the right set of laws to support human life—we wouldn’t exist otherwise.
So we learn from quantum physics and modern cosmology that even empty space can have a non-zero energy associated with it. In other words, even Nothing is actually Something. And quantum fluctuations of this vacuum energy can lead to the existence of matter and anti-matter – that literally pop out of Nothing. This is counter-intuitive and against common sense – but when it comes to quantum physics, gravity, and the energetics of empty space, commons sense is of no use – Mathematics is a far better tool to understand reality. At any rate, the Universe is under no obligation to make sense to a puny mammalian species like us.
The broad conclusion the reader may derive from the book is that the only way to answer the question of why we have Something and not Nothing is to explore the fabric of reality using the scientific method and the tools of science. Everything else is pure speculation. Only a scientific explanation will be evidence-based and – more importantly – verifiable.
And so, coming down from the cosmological and ontological down to the more mundane, the editors of ‘New Scientist’ magazine’s compendium on Nothing, give the reader an insight into how penguin chicks, men’s nipples, anti-matter traps, and xenon are all connected by Nothing. Which is not to say they are unrelated – but rather that they are connected by the notion of Nothing – the concept of Nothing.
Along the way the reader is treated to a history of the concept of Zero, an exploration of why some animals do Nothing all day, what happens in our brains when we try to think of Nothing, what is a vacuum, our journey towards absolute Zero, the Big Bang and the Omega Point, the placebo power of Nothing, death, unconsciousness and so much more.
All in all, who would have thought there was so much to explore and understand about Nothing. For some, the ultimate Nothing may come trillions of years into the future after the heat death of the Universe when the last of the protons decay and all matter has evaporated into Nothing. Or perhaps we will reach Omega Point when we have learnt everything there is to know and nothing unknown is left to know. At any rate, there’s more to Nothing than first meets the eye.
