Nothing Throughout The Ages

I'm fascinated by the systems by which we, as humans, make and communicate knowledge. From the very beginning of our species we've done our best to devise ways to understand the natural world and our place in it, and we've used a huge number of different systems of thought to organize, piece together, and build a more complete picture of the world for ourselves.

I think a lot of people may misunderstand my point here, so let me be very clear, when I say a system of knowledge-making I mean any system, no matter how misunderstood, how imprecise, or how flawed it might seem to modern sensibilities. Religion is a knowledge system, science is a knowledge system, oral tales and legends are a knowledge system, so is writing, music, folklore, culture, and any other way humans pass down forms of knowledge from one generation to the next.

Every system like this has its flaws and its benefits. Oral tales and folklore for example are excellent ways to pass down traditions and values, but they're terrible ways to ensure later generations understand the precise temperature at which water boils.

But in particular, I'm very interested in the places where systems of knowledge converge on similar or identical truths, even if they do so for different reasons.

An early-modern diagram of atoms. Drawing: me.

For example, an alchemist by the name of George Starkey, living in England in the 1650s, discovered a process by which he could chemically cause water to freeze via the endothermic reaction of sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride) with water, though he explained the phenomenon very differently than we would today—believing instead that he had isolated the quality of coldness and dryness by manipulating the fundamental particles of the compound. Nevertheless, his method worked (and worked well enough for his friends to try persuading him to sell "artificial ice" to Italian nobles in the summer).¹

Nothing, Null & the Void

Likewise the concept of Nothing has puzzled generations of knowledge-makers. Famously the number Zero was absent from Western mathematics until it was introduced around 1200 C.E.. Adding Nothing to a number was considered nonsense. Why even do the math problem then?

In regard to physics, Aristotle argued, rather forcefully, that Nothing (what he called the void) simply cannot exist because such an existence would be paradoxical. Aristotle viewed matter as continuous, and did not accept the idea of the "atom" (that is, a smallest particle of matter) precisely because it would beg a very obvious question: what's between the atoms? It couldn't be nothing, because Nothing couldn't exist.

Another depiction of corpuscles. Drawing: me.

This school of thought lasted for over a thousand years. Eventually though particle theory, or what was called at the time "the corpuscular theory of matter" became increasingly popular right around the time of the Scientific Revolution. All the while, the question that Aristotle posed went unanswered.

Today we know that the vacuum does indeed exist*. (Uh oh)

Indeed the classical vacuum: without air or other gross matter, exists in plenty. Most of space is empty, even most of what we call matter is empty. This is the truth of space and of matter: they are made of mostly nothing. However there are several kinds of nothing, and empty space is only one of those kinds. At the barest level, our current understanding suggests that space, even when devoid of matter or force particles, is still filled with something: namely quantum fields, and even more abstractly with potential.

And this is where the asterisk from before comes in: as far as we know, there is no patch of space that is truly devoid of these fundamental building blocks, so in a way: Aristotle was right.²

Math ado about Nothing

As I mentioned before, Western mathematics had to wait until the thirteenth century to be introduced to the concept of Zero in a formal way. Though once incorporated, Nothing, represented by the number zero, proved to be incredibly useful.

Today the concept of Nothing underpins our entire understanding of numbers. Indeed it seems one can construct all the natural numbers out of it. In this way Mathematics scoffs at poor Aristotle, for unlike matter which is mostly nothing, the counting numbers and therefore all numbers are really nothing at all!³

Nothing, it turns out, is Everything.

Consider constructing ℕ using the Empty Set
(i.e. a set containing nothing):
  0 = {}
  1 = {{}}
  2 = {{{}}}
  ...

Religious Nothing

The Abrahamic Religions (along with many other faiths) also feverishly debate the concept of Nothing. In particular, there is the idea that the Christian God created the universe "ex nihilo", from nothing, as written in the Book of Genesis. Likewise faiths from all over the world deal with the question of Nothing, though usually in the context of the question: Why is there Anything?

Creation stories, like that in Genesis, exist all over the world and come in many truly incredible forms.

All across the world, throughout time and space, humans have needed an answer to the same fundamental questions and we've found a bunch of conflicting and corroborating ways to answer them. Each of these answers have some truth to them and some methods of knowledge-making attempt to answer questions that others simply cannot. Each system is therefore one of partial truths. Science, for example, can answer the question of how matter moves, but it cannot answer what it means to exist.

I think that's what I love about studying knowledge-systems. I find myself trying to inhabit the minds of those who lived under very different presuppositions about the world, to see the universe through their eyes, and in doing so to find some new and partial truths about the world.

Nothing Is

In particular, the concept of Nothing has confounded our reasoning for millenia, and while we seem to have a good grip on it now, it's important to remember that we really only guess at its properties (if Nothing can even have properties—Aristotle, help!).

Indeed, the concept of Nothing has evolved over the past several thousand years, and even still we debate what it really means. That's something I love about questions like this: the debate will likely never end. Questions posed before the Fall of Rome still rattle around in the minds of people today and while sometimes Physics, or Mathematics, or one's Faith can make attempts to answer these questions, we may truly never know. Such truths may be beyond us.