Why nothing and nothingness could be the key to everything

Key insights from the world of nothingness

image source: wikimedia commons and personal art work

Everything from human beings to weird low-temperature phenomena like liquids that defy gravity, stems from the fact that there are two kinds of particles; those that like to socialise and those that don’t. Sounds familiar? — Nothing, Michael Brooks

When we start to speculate on nothingness from a philosophical angle, so many paradoxes start to arise. What is the nature of nothing? How can something come from nothing? The book Nothing by New Scientist is a collection of essays that approaches this issue from the scientific standpoint and reveals how much of what we find in nature has its basis in nothingness and non-existence.

First of all I would like to share with you a couple of anecdotal pieces of information, before moving on to more broad theoretical ideas. So to begin, an interesting historical fact concerns the number zero and how it didn’t come into existence in its own right as an independent entity until 800A.D, with the Hindu-Arabic zero. This was then introduced into Europe in 1200A.D, via Fibonacci, as a unique placeholder, and I guess this historical process shows how all cultures have an impact on the development of science.

The second, cool anecdotal insight concerns how in space we can find certain tunnels or contours where the gravitational effects of planets are cancelled out. These tubes can be thought of as being interplanetary superhighways, which can be used potentially in the future by spacecraft in order to then reach a stable ‘Langrage point’ where it can loop.

Now we shall move on to the nitty-gritty, grand ideas. It would be wrong to talk about nothingness and not mention the Big Bang. Whether we agree with this theory or not is up to us, but a key distinction made when we speculate on the idea, is the view that the physical universe came into existence “with time” and not “in time”. Time did not exist before the universe, and this thought is made by St Augustine and later confirmed by Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Now, related to this, is the following idea or picture of the cosmos, shared by other thinkers in other books, but I would like to share it again, as it relates also to one of the dreams I had as a small child. The thought argues that our universe is just one bubble of space, within an infinite number of bubbles surrounding it. I recall having such a dream of falling and being trapped in a bubble, with many bubbles surrounding the bubble I was enclosed in. According to what the scientist argued, each bubble represents a Big Bang and a separate universe. Interesting.

Moving on, scientists are constantly trying to uncover the essence of nothingness, and nothing (pun intended) is more reminiscent of this than CERN and the goal of creating a perfect vacuum. This supposed invisible quantum vacuum ether has been renamed dark energy, and may hold the secret as to how the universe works. New speculations regarding the vacuum have arisen, and according to quantum theory even a hypothetical perfect vacuum is filled with “zero-point energy”.

What I have noticed, however, is how the more we try to reach a fundamental basis of reality, this perfect vacuum, the more it slips from our grasp, and this can be explained by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. This principle states that some pairs of measurable quantities are so connected, that the more you know about one, the less you do about the other. We can apply this to our search for the perfect vacuum; we cannot measure the energy of a physical system without committing an infinite amount of time to the process, therefore by definition we can never find ultimate reality.

To end, I would like to share the most important point made in the book. It concerns chemistry and fermions. I was fascinated with chemistry as a teenager and completed one year of pharmacy studies in Liverpool, and so this thought was very meaningful to me. The writer shares the principle in chemistry whereby identical fermions cannot be in the same quantum state, and argues that this is the reason for our existence. Since electrons start to move further away from the nucleus and, therefore become free to engage in bonding and other chemical activities, the result of such a process is life itself. Sounds perfectly valid to me.

So, it leads me to this loose rhetorical question, linking science to psychoanalysis; is the Lacanian Real the world of chemistry?