Nothing
© Clara Moskowitz/LiveScience
What is nothing? Empty space? The absence of something? Scientists are hard-pressed to define the concept.
New York - It was all much ado about nothing as physicists and thinkers came together to debate the concept of nothing Wednesday (March 20) here at the American Museum of Natural History.

The simple idea of nothing, a concept that even toddlers can understand, proved surprisingly difficult for the scientists to pin down, with some of them questioning whether such a thing as nothing exists at all.

The first, most basic idea of nothing - empty space with nothing in it - was quickly agreed not to benothing. In our universe, even a dark, empty void of space, absent of all particles, is still something.

"It has a topology, it has a shape, it's a physical object," philosopher Jim Holt said during the museum's annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, which this year was focused on the topic of "The Existence of Nothing."

As moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum's Hayden Planetarium, said, "If laws of physics still apply, the laws of physics are not nothing."

Deeper nothing

But there is a deeper kind of nothing, argued theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University, which consists of no space at all, and no time, no particles, no fields, no laws of nature. "That to me is as close to nothing as you can get," Krauss said.

Holt disagreed.

"Is that really nothing?" he asked."There's no space and there's no time. But what about physical laws, what about mathematical entities? What about consciousness? All the things that are non-spatial and non-temporal."

Nothing Debate
© Clara Moskowitz/LiveScience
Neil deGrasse Tyson hosted a debate on the existence of nothing March 20 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Other speakers offered different ideas for nothing, such as a mathematical concept of nothing put forward by science journalist Charles Seife, author of Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (Penguin Books, 2000). He proposed starting with a set of numbers that included only the number zero, and then removing zero, leaving what's called a null set. "It's almost a Platonic nothing," Seife said.

The theoretical physicist Eva Silverstein of Stanford University suggested a highly technical nothing based on quantum field theory that involved a quantum system lacking degrees of freedom (dimensions). "The ground state of a gapped quantum system is my best answer," she said.

Holt suggested another idea of nothing.

"The only even remotely persuasivedentition of nothing I've heard form a physicist came from Alex Vilenkin," a physicist at Tufts University, Holt said."Imagine the surface of a ball. It's a finite space but with no boundary. Then imagine it shrinking down to a point." That would create a closed space-timewith zero radius.

Absence of something

Still, Holt said he wasn't won over by that definition either, and wasn't convinced that nothing actually exists.

"Analytic philosophers say nothing is a noun, it seems like a name for an entity, but it's not - it just means not anything," he said."What's so special about nothing? It's not a fruitful philosophical notion."

But just because nothing may be prohibitively difficult to conceptualize, doesn't mean it's not a real thing, Krauss countered.

"There are lots of things in science that are impossible to get any intuitive handle on, but that doesn't mean they don't exist," Krauss said.

This difficulty in understanding nothing dates back a long time. The ancient Greeks had no concept of zero and hated the idea so much they refused to incorporate zero into their number system, even when their astronomical calculations called for it.

"We humans have a real revulsion for nothing, for a void," Seife said. "For us nothingness represents something that we're afraid of, disorder, a breaking of the rules."

Ultimately, the definition of nothing may just be an ever-moving target, shifting with every scientific revolution as new insights show us what we thought was nothing is really something.

"Maybe nothing will never be resolved," Tyson said.


i guess they have nothing better to waste time and money on?

Nothing is not that difficult to grasp. It is just the absence of everything else. The problem comes in when you try to define empty space and space is something. In fact space may be a tangible substance filled with energy... even when it appears empty. There may be no way to drain empty space of energy (due to quantum effects) and empty space itself may be "something" like the other component of Einstein's space/time.

i agree, even tho i don't believe in spacetime, but just because we can't see it, or don't know about it, doesn't mean it's not there...

I foresee a very interesting "Scientific" Debate on that!
You can quote me on this!

lol... have to keep these grants coming, huh...

I mean the Debate right on here,with the Proponents of "Nothing Exists"!

lol... i'm sure your right! ... if nothing exists, does that mean it's something?

Well its your definition of nothing, I think. First simply because it can pass through you as you do not exist... it does not necessarily mean that it is nothing. Gravity is comprised of particles that pass through solid objects almost independently of it, creating a binding in either orbit, or to the surface of the body it is moving towards (often things such as center of planets) whether it is in or out of the atmosphere.

Secondly their is something that is familiar with many physicists. Which most people would consider to be nothing... it bends to large masses such as planets creating a completely invisible pockets that helps keep the planet more locked into it's orbit ( picture rolling a bowling ball across a trampoline and how the trampoline would bend into a pocket where the bowling ball was at ). This same thing is turned inside out under the pressure of a black hole. It is the pocket of space that is turned inside out where energy, planets, stars, rays of light and other debris is consumed into this pocket of space. If it was truly nothing..these things would not occur.

So even though when you say "there is nothing in there" referring to whatever. They may not be referring to a sub-atomic world that helps support physical objects and their behaviors in space.

Nothing less then that can imply very strange things happening. What I am referring to above is responsible for supporting objects in a physical world and could be haywire without it. Truly brainstorming means that you may occupy more then a place at a time in a strange way. Because it supports the behaviors that we take for granted.

how do you know gravity passes though solid objects? last i heard, they had no clue as to what gravity is...

"No Idea" is not really the proper descriptive term. Gravitons are ideas. So are closed verses open strings in the manifestations of M theory. No one believes that one theory has it all right or explained yet but the directions to look are limited and the answers are sure to be mathematically consistent. Hence "M" theory is a pretty good idea.

It seems like they would learn something. After all, dark matter did not exist a few decades ago. I don't think we can ever have truly nothing, we might come close though.

i still think gravity is of an electro-magnetic nature... the more atoms, the bigger pull/charge the body would have... i'm not very familiar with m-theory, and a haven't made up my mind on dark matter/energy yet either... i'm kind of leaning toward the electo-magentic theory there too, because of the opposite polls pushing away from each other...

Nothing is a complete absence of matter, energy and forces.

Well the solar wind occupies every cm of space so you do not have nothing. Maybe if we made a steel ball and vacuumed it out it would contain nothing, but I'm not sure of that either.

There is a reason why I said that nothing is a complete absence of matter, energy and forces. An area that is a vacuum can still have gravitational force passing through it.

I have always stated that "Nothing does not exist."

(Also, "Zero" does not exist because it represents nothing.)

BUT if 'nothing" needs to be defined, I would define it as
the potential for something.

If you were to ask David Bohm, he might say that "nothing" is that which has not yet unfolded.

Nothing = The enfolded [or implicate] order.
Something = The unfolded [or Explicate] order.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ5-BTdcqjk

NOTHING FROM NOTHING / BILLY PRESTON

i'm not sure of either one of yalls points here... there is solar wind, but that is generated by stars and their ilk, so the further away from them you are, the less solar wind we would see... and i'm still not clear on why you think gravity waves pass through objects...

I didn't say that gravity passes through objects.
I said, " An area that is a vacuum can still have gravitational force passing through it."

However, since you mentioned it, yes, gravitational force does pass through objects. Whenever you are inside a building, gravitational force passes through the floor(s) of the building to reach you.