In search of Nothing
Starting with Albert Einstein’s famous quote which is very close to my heart and mind, “The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence”. This is my take on a question I had for years which drives me sleepless.
“What is truly Nothing or Nothingness?” or “When can we say that there is nothing?”
There are a lot of terms used to describe Nothingness like void, emptiness, non-existent and nullity; many individuals and religions across history have tried in their own way to define Nothingness and the most common definition is “state of not existing”.
Scientifically a ‘state’ of any system(object of interest) can hold an enormous amount of information about that system, which means Nothingness cannot be a state. For example,
Tommy owns a pen and we call that state ‘1’, when Tommy doesn’t have a pen we call it ‘0’. Does this ‘0’ represent nothing? Even though ‘0’ is thought of as nothing it still has valuable information (i.e) Tommy doesn’t own a pen. This isn’t just true for the binary systems like Tommy owning a pen, it is true for almost every system that one can think of. Tommy can have 2, 3, or even 20 million pens but still having no pen has some information embedded in Tommy’s existence.
So if Nothingness is not a state, how else can we define it? If trying to define it doesn’t work let us try to form Nothingness by stripping down the essence of existence step by step.
Starting from the earth, standing on the land is obviously isn’t empty so let’s get rid of land and go to the atmosphere but here we can find air molecules which is something. So we move further into space and we can observe that space is filled with space dust, electromagnetic fields, radiations from far galaxies, cosmic entities, and low-density particles of elements like hydrogen and helium. In order to form Nothingness, we have to get rid of all these things. As we go deeper in space moving away from these cosmic entities far away from galaxies beyond which the particle density(the number of particles per unit space) in space keeps reducing, this is the place where it is most likely for us to find nothingness.
Let’s assume for a moment that humans were technologically advanced to create a superspeed wrap drive that can take us into space beyond all the cosmic entities where the particle density is zero. Now can we call it the Nothingness?
Well, I don think so. To get a perspective let’s go back to earth to our homes for a minute to sit back and relax, maybe have a cup of tea. You make tea and transfer it to your favourite teacup and start sipping. Now, even though we weren’t going to drink the cup we still need a cup to hold our tea just like how we need a road to walk and the river needs a path to flow. Everything physical needs a medium to be.
Going back to the zero particle density region even though there are no particles in that space, there is a medium that holds our wrap drive in this case. The presence of an unknown medium that supports the entire universe or possibly the multiverse makes Nothingness hard to find.
Let’s take a moment here and assume that we have reached a place where there is no particle and no medium. In quantum mechanics, this state is called a quantum vacuum or quantum nothingness where there is no physical particle and the system is in the lowest energy possible, presumable no energy. (Quantum mechanics is a theory in physics that describes the nature of sub-atomic particles)
And quantum mechanics describes this state of quantum nothingness as very unstable. To get a perspective of why it is unstable think of it as how the heat energy in the room with (high energy) flows into the ice cube (low energy) and melts it. It is not exactly the same but it’s a good analogy. This state of quantum nothingness being very unstable it will inevitably form an existence and stop being Nothingness, one possible explanation of how our universe could have been created out of nothing.
Coming this far we couldn’t find Nothingness yet, we couldn’t describe it as a state and we couldn’t find Nothingness in the vicinity of our logics. Maybe it’s beyond our logical horizon for us to observe.
To make it simple let’s put some constraints to what Nothingness adheres to out of our logic,
- Absence of any physical existence — now this is like a ‘0’ state.
- Absence of energy — now it acts as a sink that can gain more energy.
- Absence of any laws of physics — now it can’t be a state since it doesn’t act like our universe.
- Shouldn’t be able to interact with our known existence.
With these constraints, we can argue that Nothingness is the absence of all physical existence such as matter, antimatter, subatomic particles etc. which can create very low energy due to the absence of any particles. The absence of laws of physics restrict it from acting as a sink to gain any energy from the environment and since it doesn’t interact with the known universe it is truly unobservable.
This makes a strong point that Nothing losses its quality of Nothingness when it is observed. Because observing gives it some attributes which make it not truly Nothing anymore.
In conclusion, maybe there is no way of actually knowing what is Nothingness or the opposite of existence. If we can’t know what is Nothingness doesn’t it make existence questionable? How can we define existence without knowing what is the absence of existence? How do we exist without Nothing? Why there is something rather than nothing? Well, that’s an article for another day
Stay curious!!
