J-zine - Nothing

Nothing

I got plenty o' nuttin'

and nuttin's plenty for me.

Porgy and Bess.

A page about Nothing? What is J-zine coming to? Well, doing nothing is a favourite pastime of many of us -- so let's relax and spend some time on the topic.

Grab your dictionary and you'll probably find something like this:

Nothing: nuth'ing, n: no thing: the non-existent: zero number or quantity: the figure representing it: a thing or person of no significance or value: an empty or trivial utterance: a low condition: a trifle: no difficulty or trouble

OK, you say, what's so special about that? It is noticable that it is chiefly defined by the absence of something else. That figures from its etymology; [no thing < Old English: nan {ne + an = not any} þing]. We are conditioned to a world that is full of things, so a state where things are absent is remarkable and needs a word to express it.

The constant presence of everything around us drives some to seek its opposite: solitude and emptiness. We may look for the inner void that is a goal of meditation. Or we may find communion with Nature in a deserted beach or on a mountain top. Yet no matter how remote and desolate a spot we find ourselves, there is still the ground we stand on; the air that we breathe; and not least ourselves.

It took our ancestors quite some time to get to grips with Nothing. Some six thousand years ago, the Sumerians in Mesopotamia used clay tokens as counters. Writing started when they pressed such counters onto a wet clay tablet to make a permanent copy. (In case you didn't know, writing was invented by the Sumerian accountants to keep track of how much tax had to be payed). They didn't invent a symbol for zero because there wasn't a counter for zero (it was no thing ie. no counter). This made life pretty tricky. Think over it; without a symbol to represent zero how can your bank know if your salary cheque is for $1, $100 or $10000? Then some Indian mathematicians got clever and started putting a dot (almost nothing!) to show that there was nothing in that position. The invention of nothing (zero) was one of the great advances of the ancient world.

This starker definition of Nothing comes from The Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Nothing: Nothing is an awe-inspiring, yet essentially undigested concept, highly esteemed by writers of a mystical or existentialist tendency, but by most others regarded with anxiety, nausea or panic.

Philosophers have a knack of making mountains out of molehills; who else can make so much of Nothing?

Quantum physicists come to mind. They took the classical vacuum [an entirely empty space] and filled it with the the fields of the Electroweak theory and Quantum Chromodynamics. Their nothing is a teaming menagerie of virtual particles. But surely the prize for creating something from nothing must go to Cosmologists; at least those of the modern school who adopt the no-boundary suggestion made popular by Stephen Hawking in his book, A Brief History of Time. The gist of their argument is that the initial state of the Universe was the a quantum fluctuation; out of Nothing they will create the space-time continuum and fill it with the matter of the entire Universe. Now who can beat that?

Dreams

Nothing

Further Reading: