Where can I round up enough nothing for an in-depth study.

“Where can I round up enough nothing”
Your pants ? :P

naughtyloli

“Where can I round up enough nothing for an in-depth study.”
Nothing exists to do your study.

I’ve sort of wondered about that “expanding universe” stuff—in that theory aren’t we also expanding? aren’t our molecules growing farther and farther apart as we grow in size proportionately to the expanding universe?

Perhaps the expanding universe is a cosmic attempt to fill up all the nothing that could possibly exist. Horror vacui [AKA the Victorian aesthetic sensibility]

I can send you a pile of gigaohms to study, or even teraohms, even petaohms.
.

You will need a gallon of Republican Respect for the Presidency, two gallons of Tea Policy Foreign Policy, and 6 gallons of Media Restraint. Mix together, and make sure it doesn’t implode.

You could sit in on a few Zen sessions, wearing something with large pockets and surreptitiously wielding a small net.

You could look up Richard Fariña’s “nothing” poems. They’re in the back of one of his books, the counterculture novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me or the posthumous collection Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone (I’ve forgotten which).

You could carry around a big pot lined with Teflon. Nothing sticks to Teflon.

You could suction out the middles of Cheerios and all the doughnuts in the world.

And don’t forget the insides of zeroes. That ought to keep you going for a while.

It would be too sad to send you into classrooms.

Paris Hilton’s CV?

“How do I study nothing…”

First, break down the word.
“no” = without, sans, minus…

But “thing” is a bit more difficult to define. Is a thought a thing? I personally don’t believe so. Typically, the word thing should only refer to items of material existence, measurable in terms of energy or matter. So what of phenomenon that cannot be measured?

Can a dream be weighed? A brain can be measured. But can a mind?

Thoughts, dreams, mind, emotions do not consist of energy/matter. We cannot measure them with any physical instrumentation. Yes yes, we can measure the effects of them upon the physical realm. But we cannot measure the actual phenomenon which creates the effects.

Since they are non physical, then I propose they are the “no”+“thing” that you look for.

Your in-depth-study of nothing would be well served by studying non physical phenomenon. You never know. You just might find something!

The “no”+“thing” that you seek can be understood by wondering why a CD representing 100mb of information (thought) doesn’t weigh any more or less than a DVD representing 4GB of information (thought).

We think of it all wrong. The information is not IN the disk. The disk only represents the information. The disk represents a thought which cannot be weighed. The thought is non local. The disk represents a non local, non physical phenomenon. It can even represent the thoughts of people presumed to be dead for thousands of years. Spooky voodoo man!

Nature abhors a vacuum. When you think you have captured a little nothingness some pesky virtual particle pops up and contaminates it. Real, pristine, incontrovertible nothingness would have no dimensions of space, no dimensions of time and wouldn’t really exist. And so we’re stuck with it, there has to be something.

There’s plenty of it right in front of you !

Nothing equals everything. Makes sense to me.
I’ve had two martinis tonight.
But then i tend to simplify everything but not nothing.

@ragingloli My motto is when all else fails, use your head. Do that, and it doesn’t matter what’s in your pants. :-)

@Inspired_2write Thanks. You see the problem.

@anartist No. Not even our local cluster of galaxies is expanding. It is in fact collapsing under the locally stronger force of gravity. In another 5 billion years, out Milky Way Galaxy will collide with our nearest neighbor, Andromeda. As we move out from 100 billion years toward a trillion years, all the galaxies in our local supercluster will form a super-galaxy which will eventually collapse into a supermassive black hole. But the apparent nothingness between our local cluster and the next, even though they are moving apart at what would appear to an observer as superluminal speeds, will actually not be nothing but a boiling soup of quantum possibilities with mass, energy, and virtual particles poofing into and out of existence.

@LuckyGuy I can’t resist the observation that every resistance I’ve ever encountered came from something, and not nothing.

@filmfann That might be just what it takes to fire up the infinite improbability drive and fly off into nothing, or at least the free lunch at the end of the Universe.

@Jeruba How large a pocket do I need to hold nothing? I’ve never sized one for that purpose.

@ucme That’s not the sort of absence I’m interested in.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies Very prescient. The definition of nothing is nothing easy to accomplish. As it’s become apparent in particle physics and quantum mechanics; particularly as we try to correlate general relativity and quantum mechanics, that not only can you get something from nothing; you MUST get something from nothing, theists who are aware of the challenge have been in a tizzy to move the goal posts on what nothing means.

@flutherother You have articulated my problem perfectly. I wish I could give you two Great Answers.

@dabbler I am looking for nothing but there is nothing there but stuff.

@Tropical_Willie Finishing up my second glass of wine, and nothing is bothering me anymore.

now here is nowhere

@ETpro, doesn’t matter, as long as it has a hole in it. Then, of course, it can hold infinity.

I studied nothing at the expense of the US Government for about six months. Then they kicked me out of their school!

@Yetanotheruser I guess you weren’t learning nothing fast enough to meet government standards.

@ETpro Or maybe I learned too much, instead of nothing!

Sartre explored the philosophical, as opposed to scientific, concept of nothingness. We need to distinguish between not perceiving something and perceiving the absence of something. Sartre spoke of the perception of nothing as the realization of the absence of a particular something. If we are expecting someone to show up and the person does not arrive, we become aware of the non-presence of the person. To Sartre, the understanding of nothingness lies at the heart of our being. He does an interpretation of Descartes into existential terms. We perceive objects in the world, but we become aware of ourselves as an emptiness, what is left over after you remove all our perceptions. We come into the world without definition and spend the rest of our lives in the effort of defining ourselves.

@Yetanotheruser Wouldn’t that qualify as not learning noting fast enough?

@LostInParadise Yes, I seem to recall that “nothing” fascinated Sartre. I believe he found nothing almost as fascinating as the somethings of Simone de Beauvoir.

Just remember that:

When “nothing” becomes “something” it is no longer nothing.
Tropical_Willie

With quantum vacuum energy, particles popping in and out of existence constantly, the question becomes: Can there even be “nothing”?
And if the answer to that is ‘No’, does this not destroy the question “How can the universe come from nothing?”

@ragingloli At the minimum it rephrases the question to one of “How can a universe NOT come from nothing?”