A Whole Lot of Nothing

In an episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza and Jerry Seinfeld try to sell an idea for a new TV show to an NBC executive:

GEORGE: I think I can sum up the show for you with one word: NOTHING.
NBC BOSS: Nothing?

GEORGE: (Smiling) Nothing.
NBC BOSS: (Unimpressed) What does that mean?
NBC BOSS: The show is about nothing.
JERRY: (To George) Well, it's not about nothing.
GEORGE: (To Jerry) No, it's about nothing.

George then continues to explain his idea to an increasingly annoyed NBC boss, and the dialogue continues:

NBC BOSS: How is that a show?
JERRY: Well, uh, maybe something happens on the way to work.
GEORGE: No, no, no. Nothing happens.
JERRY: Well, something happens.
NBC BOSS: Well, why am I watching it?
GEORGE: Because it's on TV.
NBC BOSS: Not yet. (in a threatening tone)

I know a guy who has dedicated a whole blog to the concept of nothingness but what is exactly Nothing, and where can we find it? We are told that there are regions in outer space where there is nothing - a void; is this really true? Is it possible to find the void closer to home - say, on Earth?

Believe it or not, the void constitutes a big part of the structure of everyday things. Let's consider an atom; if we were to magnify the size of an atom so that it has a diameter of 100 metres, it's nucleus would have the size of a billiard ball. So the main constituent of an atom is ... well ... nothing. Everything that surrounds us - people, diamonds, and even mother Earth herself is made up of empty space punctuated by atomic nuclei and electrons. If we were to take a skyscraper, and remove all the empty space that exists in its constituent atoms, we would be left with an object the size of a marble with a mass of 50,000 tonnes; who would've thought that a skyscraper could be so heavy. But is this empty space really empty? Is it a true void?

Aristotle said that nature abhors a vacuum, but vacuums are everywhere - e.g. in light bulbs and in the cathode ray tubes of out televisions. There is no doubt that a section of space can be cleared of all ordinary matter. But even after all solids, liquids and gases have been eliminated from a container, the remaining space still has a complex structure; it is filled with electromagnetic radiation. Part of this radiation is of a thermal nature and can be eliminated by lowering the temperature. Other sources of invisible radiation are apparent as soon as we turn on a television or a radio: signals of TV shows such as Big Brother and the six o'clock news can be found even in a vacuum. What if all the man-made sources of radiation were to be switched off? Would we then have a perfect vacuum in our frozen container? There is another form of energy that is intrinsic and cannot be eliminated. It is the so-called zero point energy. Evidence of the existence of zero point energy has been found with the Casimir effect, and its effects are observable in the problems it causes in nanotechnology. The origin of this energy is the quantum fluctuations. In the quantum world, the uncertainty principle allows for particles and antiparticles to suddenly come into existence and then annihilate.

So the void is not really empty. Is there really such a concept as "nothing" or "zero"? Sure, it has been suggested that the mass of a photon or of a graviton is in fact zero, but this is yet to be proven. Has Nothing ever existed? It has been said that the reason why there is Something rather than Nothing is that Nothing is unstable. Did the universe begin with nothing? St. Augustine said that God made the world from "prope nihil" - i.e. almost nothing. This seems to correspond with modern cosmology; it is believed that after the big bang, matter and anti-matter almost annihilated one another and we almost had nothing but there was a slight imperfection in symmetry - there were slightly more quarks than anti-quarks - and this slight imbalance was enough to make possible life, the universe and everything.

It appears that there is no such thing as Nothing. Aristotle was right (for the wrong reasons) that nature truly does abhor a vacuum; the total absence of matter and energy is impossible to obtain. However, attempting to come as close as possible to a state of void is important if we are to understand the nature of matter - particularly at the particle level. This is done by using huge particle accelerators, where particles are made to smash against one another at high velocities and energies in order to study the results of such collisions. Naturally, the paths of these speeding particles should not be impeded by any pesky unwanted particles so, for this reason the tunnel through which the particles are accelerated, is made to be as perfect a vacuum as possible. The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva is due to be operational in 2008, and it is hoped that the mysterious Higgs boson (dubbed the "God particle" by Leon Lederman) will be detected ... but only after particle collisions are made in a tunnel filled with near-nothingness.
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