One of the greatest pleasures of my life has been to raise our youngest granddaughter from since she was a couple of weeks old. She’ll be 21 this year and has developed into a beautiful, smart young woman.
Like me, she loves motorbikes, tattoos, reading, drawing, mathematics and physics. Also, like me, she has Asperger’s Syndrome.
The reason I mention this is because due to our neurodivergent way of thinking, observing and experiencing the world around us, we sometimes get into conversations about things that “normal” neurotypical people (i.e. like her grandmother and the rest of our family and friends) often find strange or completely uninteresting.
Anyway, we had one of those moments over Christmas. I have no idea why I choose to share this with you, apart from the fact that I wanted to write it down and thought perhaps some of you may find it at least a little thought provoking.
One of the gifts I received from her was a small package labelled “to the man who has everything”. Intrigued, I shook the light package slightly, but could hear nothing to give me any clue as to it’s content.
It was beautifully wrapped in hand-made paper with a golden silk bow. I hesitated opening it, as it looked so precious just as it was and I didn’t want to spoil that.
By now my granddaughter could hardly contain her excitement and eagerly asked me to open it.
I undid the bow and carefully unwrapped the paper to reveal a little square white cardboard box.
As I opened it, she burst into laughter.
The box was empty.
Understanding her joke I smiled and said thank you.
Slightly confused by my reaction, she said, “but there’s nothing in the box!”
Oh, I said, there’s not nothing in the box.
Even more confused she rushed over to look in the box for herself.
There’s nothing in there Grandad!
I repeated that there was not nothing.
What do you mean, not nothing?
WARNING: This is where things start to get weird, continue at your own peril! …
Of course there’s air in the box, but generally we think of air as nothing.
Because you can’t see the air. Air is just molecules: primarily oxygen and nitrogen, which is 99% of all the molecules you are inhaling.
There are other molecules too; a little bit of CO₂ and some trace amounts of other elements, but the primary ones are oxygen and nitrogen and they are transparent, leading us to overlook their physical presence.
Our perception of existence is largely influenced by our sensory experiences. Often what we sense or what we declare “is” or “is not” is based simply on how our senses interpret the environment around us.
For instance, we can see a transparent window due to light reflection, yet if we could see using microwaves, everything would appear transparent since microwaves penetrate walls. This is evident when your mobile phone receives signals across rooms.
Alright, so how many molecules are there in this box that contains “nothing”?
Well, we know the box is approx. 10cm3, which is 10% of a cubic meter and we know that a cubic meter contains a septillion (a trillion trillion) air molecules, so the box contains approx. sextillion (1.0E+23) molecules – i.e. 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Now, that’s a lot of molecules. But if air is something more than nothing, then let’s get rid of the air and see what’s left of “nothing”.
Using a laboratory vacuum like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider would allow us to extract practically all air molecules from the box.
Even then, about 10 billion molecules per cubic meter remain after vacuuming. A massive reduction from 10 to the 24th power to 10 billion molecules (10 to the 24th power) per cubic meter.
A significant reduction undoubtedly, but we still haven’t quite reached “nothing”.
To explore further, let’s consider interplanetary space where the vacuum density drops a thousandfold compared to Earth’s best lab vacuums — approx. 10 million molecules per cubic meter remain.
OK, we just dropped by a factor of a thousand molecules.
Moving into interstellar space reduces this even more dramatically. Now we’re down to a mere half a million particles per cubic meter.
500,000 particles may still seem like a lot, but compared to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 particles per cubic meter it’s a mere fraction compared with Earth’s atmospheric density and – relatively speaking – almost nothing.
It’s also a reminder that this “stuff” expands throughout the universe and there are places where it has collected and gathered.
That’s where you get stars and planets – and people!
Where it hasn’t collected and gathered is much more scattered and tenuous.
Now what would you imagine would have less than interstellar space?
That’s right, intergalactic space presents an even sparser environment since galaxies cluster matter together; finding atoms here becomes rare at perhaps one atom every ten cubic meters – however, it’s still not absolute nothing.
To go further, imagine eliminating all those last remaining particles for an entirely empty box.
Completely devoid of all matter – no thing.
Now we can ask, is that “nothing”?
No, not quite, because we know from quantum physics there’s such a thing as virtual particles that come into existence and then go out of existence in less time than you can actually measure their existence. And totally empty space is full of virtual particles that fleetingly pop in and out of existence within empty spaces.
So the best “nothing” you can ever make, even with absolutely zero matter, would still nonetheless be filled with virtual particles.
Let’s suppose, for example, you could step out of our universe, so that there’s not even the “no matter” and there’s not even the “virtual particles” and there’s not even “nothing”…
Imagine you take ALL that away, the laws of physics still remain governing nature itself.
Is a region of space “nothing” if the laws of nature still apply inside that space?
You’re thinking of nothing as substance and I’m thinking of nothing as not even anything that is anything about anything.
So, if you systematically remove all laws of physics, all laws of nature, then you have a region of something out of what we can’t even call space, because space is a “thing”.
Space can bend according to Einstein relativity – the fabric of space. No matter what’s in it will bend with or without virtual particles, it’s still a “thing”.
So if we get rid of all particles, get rid of the very laws that describe nature, then there’s not only not matter, there’s not energy.
There’s no laws of physics, there is no time itself.
So put that in your box, open it and now you can say there’s nothing in the box.
It’s just something separate because no matter, no energy, no laws of physics, not even time exists.
Now there really is “no thing” there, at all.
But going deeper down the rabbit hole, we could take this even one step further and say that simply due to the fact that we can describe “it” as being “nothing” has given meaning to the “thing”, allowing me to say that it’s NOT nothing.
Because I can describe it as having nothing. So philosophical inquiry reveals the very act of describing absence imbues meaning onto it – thereby negating its true nature.
So, what does it mean to be able to describe something at all that is no-thing?
That means you’ve described something that IS a “thing”.
Therefore let’s not even have anything that you can describe.
NOW you’ve truly got nothing!
But what do you call that?
You can’t call it anything because you just contained and defined it.
You’ve just turned it into a “thing” and therefore it is NOT “nothing”.
OK, dinner’s ready …
