Nothing

[Jack]

Inspired by reading Nothing Matters and fueled by a long fascination with trying to comprehend the incomprehensible and imagine the unimaginable, I thought I'd start a thread about nothing and see what you all think about it. I'm posting it here because nothing crosses all the boundaries of human interest, from art to religion, from philosophy to mathematics.

From Nothing Matters: A Book About Nothing, "Disarmingly invisible, the point of nothing, to paraphrase Bertrand Russell on philosophy-is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth examining, and to end up with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."

There was a time in human history before nothing, at least mathematically. It was the Arabs, after conquering India, who introduced the zero to the world. Prior to that we had no way to indicate nothing numerically. Nothing fares no better in philosophy and science. Both fields were initially averse to accepting the notion of nothing and to this day quarrel over its substance and affect on our reality.

Is there a state of being in which there is nothing? Does nothing exist in reality or is it simply a philosophical construct? Is nothing something, or is it nothing? It should be obvious how paradoxical it can become to discuss nothing as if it were something, and if it is something, what is it?

I'm sure we can have some fun with this, but I'd also like to seriously explore our concepts of nothing and our attitudes toward it.

So what do you think about nothing?

[el ايمان]

So what do you think about nothing?

I don't think about it

[Jack]

Well, do. Otherwise there's no point contributing to the thread.

[Angry Citizen]

Abstract nothing or physical nothing?

[el ايمان]

I secede from the discussion.

And I think that the number 0 is useful in math, as a placemarker for nothing. Otherwise, I know that I would get confused trying to balance equations.

[Jack]

Abstract nothing or physical nothing?

Yes.

[Angry Citizen]

That was my philosophy prof's favorite response.. *sigh*

Physical nothing does not exist. Even vacuums teem with zero-point energy. If nothing ever existed, it would be an absence of reality.

Abstract nothing most certainly does exist. There are a lot of things that exist, yet should not. Imaginary numbers exist, for instance. It violates a cardinal rule of algebra in order to create the quantity i.

[R.F.]

The whole nothing thing has always been a problem for me. I for one can't imagine a universe that is infinite. This however leads to the conclusion that the universe exists in stuff . It must be [the universe] expanding in this stuff. Which means that either that stuff is infinite, or it is vested in even more stuff . I don't have to continue to show regress here [I hope].

This means either "nothing" is actually stuff, or "nothing" doesn't exist. Usually I just presuppose I am far too ignorant to grasp the concept, and stop before my heads ignites in frustration.

[sulh-i-kul]

I don't understand the difficulty.

If your language stands in the way or introduces confusion, amend it.
It's useful to distinguish between nothing and no thing. Other distinctions can be made but let's start with this one: if you're counting dollars, you're counting things and if you find there's no dollars, you say there's zero dollars or no thing (with the implication that thing = dollar in that context). Zero does not stand for nothing.
If there's no light, you see nothing. You also see no thing of course but you need to stop confusing no thing with nothing whatsoever. You can see no thing without seeing nothing. You need to process the images you see in order to perceive things. If you can't or won't do this processing (because what you're seeing is unfamiliar for instance), you see without seeing things.

There was a time in human history before nothing, at least mathematically. It was the Arabs, after conquering India, who introduced the zero to the world. Prior to that we had no way to indicate nothing numerically.

I'm afraid you went for a biased history of thought. I'll use this detail as an example.
People had ways to signify no thing before the Indian shunya. The Amerindians had the typical way to signify no thing for instance: a blank which their system of writing numbers allowed. In the Old World, the Chinese as well as the Greco-romans had explicit signs for no thing starting in late Antiquity.
The Perso-arabs introduced a superior system for basic maths and the rest is history. But "we" had implicit and explicit ways to signify "no thing" before such as the letter N in the late Roman numerical system.

The Indian shunya is nevertheless interesting because of its religious connotation. Here again, one must emphasize that shunyata doesn't mean nothingness. Don't perpetuate the confusion!

Is there a state of being in which there is nothing? Does nothing exist in reality or is it simply a philosophical construct?

By definition, nothing precludes being and reality. It is a philosphical notion.
There is however a state of being in which there is no thing.
Things are constructs. Therefore no thing is a bit like atheism. It refers to contructs like atheism refers to God. But is it a construct? Is atheism a belief about God?

[BlackSheep]

I think nothing is really only meaningful when applied to something. For example. If you ask what is in my pocket I may reply nothing, but we both understand that to mean there is nothing of consequence in my pocket. In an absolute sense nothing doesn't exist anywhere that we have access.

[DragonFly]

THAT BLANKETY BLANK ZERO

Euclid and Pythagorus never even thought of it,
Perhaps not needing it for geometry;
So it was and wasn’t ‘Greek’ to them.

Aristotle was deathly afraid of it.
Even the word ‘naughty’ came from it.

‘0’ had a chilly reception everywhere,
It’s rounded symbol enclosing nothing,
As if it could be captured,
But ‘nothing’ never changed,
Being the same even if you took it away.

Humans stumbled on zero and nothing by accident,
Then recoiled in horror, fearing it, reviling it,
And sometimes even banning it outright,
As some kind of evil influence.

After many centuries, it seemed to be tamed,
Put in its place, as a simple little placeholder.
Then the beast reared its ugly head for real,
Misbehaving like a monster right and left:

It brought instant death by multiplication,
And wrought total absurdity through division,
Still halting our expensive computers.

It exploded into the ambiguous fog of infinity;
It ran away from us in calculus,
Sliding us down the slippery slope
Of closing in on it but never reaching it.

It spawned ghosts such as negative numbers,
Imaginaries, and those ephemeral infinitesimals.

Both the genie and the genius
Had been let out of the bottle,
And the goose egg still
Confounds and confuses,
No one knowing zilch about it,
It creating paradoxes left and right.