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ETpro's avatar

How do you define nothing?

Asked by ETpro (34605points) September 8th, 2013

Some say you can’t get something from nothing, and others say you can’t help but get something from nothing. This launches a debate about what nothing means, because the argument, “You can’t get something from nothing.” begs the question, “What is your definition of nothing?”. Only when “nothing” is defined in very precise and unproven terms does the argument, “You can’t get something from nothing.” hold true.

This video (warning: 25 minutes but worth the investment in time) covers the verbal slight-of-hand some use to make something they want arise out of nothing while at the same time swearing that we all just intuitively know that you can’t get something from nothing (so long as you presuppose that “nothing” actually has the definition they wish it to have—basically that which you can’t get something from). My guess is nothing could be further from the truth.

It may seem that our intuition is correct, but intuitive understanding forged solely in a world where we observe macro-level objects leaves us with understanding that is meaningless at the quantum mechanical level. Watch the video and see what you think about how well our intuition covers events like The Singularity, the Big Bang, and what may have come “before” either.

So how do you define nothing? How can people reasonably disagree about what nothing means?

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38 Answers

drhat77's avatar

Nothing seems to be a context sensitive issue.
In spaceballs, when they’re combing the desert, and that guy says “Man, we ain’t found shit!” he is technically inaccurate. Air. A whole desert planet. Some lovely rocks. And sand! Don’t get me started on the sand. But he was functionally correct, he did not find what they we’re looking for, the protragonists of the movie.
So there was nothing of interest in the context of his search.
How can something arise from nothing? It can arise from something that we do not have the ability to measure. Like the idea that Pasteur disproved, that maggots arrise spontaneously from rotting meat. Now we know there were microscopic eggs planted by flys.
Sorry, didn’t watch the video, work firewall (and work, to tell the truth)

ucme's avatar

Dan Quayle’s IQ?

Jeruba's avatar

The answer is, as @drhat77 says, relative. The very idea that we might have different definitions that work for us (implied by the phrasing of your question) is enough to show that.

The following statements concern entirely different nothings:

• There’s nothing to stop you from being what you want to be.
• Between here and there, there’s a whole lot of nothing.
• They found nothing in his car and let him go.
• You have nothing to worry about.
• Nothing happened today.
• “What are you doing, son?”  “Nothing.”
• “What’s it going to cost us just to look?”  “Nothing.”
• “What’s wrong?” “Nothing.”

flutherother's avatar

Nothing is a hypothetical idealistic concept that has no place in reality. It means the impossible state of an absence of everything even an observer.

thorninmud's avatar

It’s the flip side of thing-ness, the “no” that gives meaning to “yes”.

talljasperman's avatar

Opposite of infinity.

Neodarwinian's avatar

” How do you define nothing? ”

Unstable.

jaytkay's avatar

This is very specific and geeky, my apologies. But anyway…

I work with databases (Microsoft SQL Server to be specific). When people ask us to find “nothing”, we have to ask “What do you mean by nothing?”

1) Zero? (If the information is a number)

2) Empty or Blank like between these quotes ”” ? (If the information is text)

3) Null? (Meaning there is no value. It is not Zero or Empty. Nobody has attempted to give it any kind of value.)

All three are perfectly good definitions of “nothing”. But they are entirely different, and we have to be sure we are giving the user THEIR version of “nothing”.

zenvelo's avatar

The love I feel for my ex-wife.

dxs's avatar

The absence of anything

fundevogel's avatar

ничево ingenting nada

janbb's avatar

@dxs Stole my answer but I will pay him nothing!

RealEyesRealizeRealLies's avatar

“Nothing. It’s what rocks dream about.”
Plato

Tropical_Willie's avatar

Definite maybe ! !

dxs's avatar

@janbb Maybe a lurve or two?

Rarebear's avatar

Mathematically zero. Physically doesn’t exist. Even empty space has virtual particles and antiparticles that pop in and out of existence.

ETpro's avatar

@drhat77 Thanks. Indeed it’s context sensitive. Between the question details and the video, I had hoped to hint at the context of interest. Do watch the video if you have time and ever leave work (Sunday afternoon—you must love work). I think you’ll find the video interesting.

@ucme Ha! Cute. (Your answer, not Dan Quale).

@Jeruba Isn’t it interesting that there could be so many different nothings?

@flutherother Yes, that’s the sort of nothing that is interesting. But if you predefine it as the perfect unobtanium, then it’s pretty hard to get something from it, since you’re trying to do that in a world created by your definition where, by your definition, it can’t exist to get something from.

@thorninmud Nice, simply worded definition.

@talljasperman Wouldn’t the opposite of infinity be zero?

@Neodarwinian It does seem to be that, even when we are not dealing with the quantum vacuum between widely spaced atoms or molecules in space, but nothing in the most dramatic sense of the word. Thanks.

@Dutchess_III GREAT ANSWER!

ETpro's avatar

@jaytkay Null comes pretty close to what this question seeks, it would seem.

@zenvelo Wow. Recent ex? Those feelings usually mellow over time.

@dxs Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say the absence of everything? It sounds like @zenvelo has an absence of love for his ex. So if you asked him, is anything gone that you used to have, he’d answer that it was. But he isn’t absent everything.

@fundevogel I’ll take your word for it.

@janbb Then read the argument above, and consider it addressed to you too. :-)

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies Ha! I had heard he said that. One wonders how many rocks he interviewed and what methods he used in determining what they dream about. :-)

@Tropical_Willie Not even gonna try. Wise man. :-)

@dxs You were expecting to get something out of nothing?

@Rarebear Here’s a pretty mindblowing short video just how much something empty space has. What is most fascinating is the timescale the simulation is running at to slow it down enough for us to visualize it.

flutherother's avatar

@ETpro My nothing is so perfect that it can only lead to more nothing but it can’t exist in nature. It has no dimensions, not even duration. And so by default there is something.

Jeruba's avatar

@ETpro, yes, it seems that 0 =/= 0.

rexacoracofalipitorius's avatar

“Nothing” is a mental shorthand we use to denote a situation where there is “someplace” for something to be (as in @jaytkay‘s databases, a field requiring a value) but no something is in that “place”. If there weren’t such a “place” (or field, or “thing to describe” or what have you) then we wouldn’t think of it as “nothing”; we’d have no reason to think of it at all.

NULL (or ‘nil’ or ‘undefined’ or ’#VALUE’ depending on the language) is a formal description of this condition.

ETpro's avatar

@flutherother Yes, that’s why I’d call it unobtanium, or handwavium.

@Jeruba Quite unintuitive, but true.

@dxs You might even get everything out of nothing.

@rexacoracofalipitorius Yes it’s not an absolute nothing, and in an absolute nothing we wouldn’t think of it as nothing because we wouldn’t be here to think. There would be no there there.

talljasperman's avatar

The amount of money in my checking account.

ETpro's avatar

@talljasperman Mine is actually in the negative number zone. When it gets there, it starts sucking money out of your surrounding moneyspace. Got to make a deposit tomorrow. :-)

Paradox25's avatar

I don’t believe there’s such a thing as nothingness. If nothingness is possible (like one alternative to the big bang theory states), then this would be a temporary unstable event. I don’t think the universe could have formed from pure nothingness, if the latter scenerio was a stable event or state. All in all it appears that all entities at their most fundamental states are a mixture of temporary positives, negatives and zero state thresholds. As long as there’s potential energy/matter truly stable nothingness can’t exist in my opinion.

ETpro's avatar

@Paradox25 What’s outside the Universe right now?

Paradox25's avatar

^^ I’ve thought about that. Perhaps more unstableness or chaos, which I’ve defined as nothingness. I’m sure you’re asking what’s the big bang version of the universe expanding into? The big bang could still be wrong despite evidence of red shifts and cosmic background radiation.

The universe is obviously expanding, but it doesn’t mean that this occured by the way of a giant quantum fluctuation expanding from a single point either. What turned this creation off? How did a giant quantum fluctuation create the universe when virtual particles don’t exist for very long? Why is the universe expanding at a rate gazillions of times faster than it should be? Why is the expansion of the universe speeding up instead of slowing down?

I attempted to get deep about this before with you a few years ago, but you considered my source a ‘crank’, even though you found no flaws in the logic I’d presented. I don’t except most theories of the universe without a degree of scepticism myself, and this keeps me off of many science threads on many sites. Obviously we need alternatives in physics, and I wouldn’t count on Relativity Theories to be united with Quantum Theory either.

ETpro's avatar

@Paradox25 It’s fascinating to think about. You might want to read up on why we think there was a Big Bang. The evidence saying there was is quite weighty. A large number of things that would have to follow if there were such an event have now been checked and found to be true. The CMBR is just one of many such confirming observations. There is also a great weight of maths flowing from Relativity and confirming it.

As to what caused the Big Bang, real science is silent on that. The only rational answer is we do not know. We can guess that this or that could have cause it, but the truth is we cannot see beyond the event horizon which the CMBR is a remnant of. We don’t know.

We can solve debates with logic. We can’t use logic to define how the Universe began. Logic’s a wonderful tool, but not one to use in inventing new theories that actually hold water. Being skeptical of the scientific method but embracing psychic phenomena may be a heady mix, but not one likely to yield workable understandings that can make communication satellites actually work.

Paradox25's avatar

Another scientist has maths which give the same results as Relativity theories do, but of course they’re stated differently. Higher velocities and stronger gravitational fields will affect the mechanisms that record time, such as quartz and casium beam atomic clocks. I frequently converse with a few of these scientists online, and the one doctor even told me how he attempted to land an experiment back in 1977 in which a casium beam atomic and an electromechanical clock would be shot off into orbit at a high velocity. The point of his experiment was to show that the atomic and electromechanical clocks would lose time differently.

I’ve asked him many tough questions, and he appears to have answered almost all of them. It’s a similar concept concerning the longer lives of muons at higher velocities, because electromagnetic theories stated that atoms would dilate at a higher velocity. His formula concerning his concept of positive and negative mass primaries (the very heart of his hypothesis) predicted that the expansion of the universe would be accelerating, and it predicted this some 6 full years before Hubble discovered it back in 1998. Several scientists also were interested in using a small capacitor (low farad capacity) in orbit at a high velocity to verify (if true) that an absolute speed could be recorded without depending upon relative speed. A charged device will emit an electromagnetic field, so the capacitor’s oscillation rate (frequency) would change according to its velocity.

We’re open to the Big Bang Theory, but where we’re sceptical is that we don’t think this was the beginning, or that it occured without being preprogrammed. I’m not fond of talking about this theory online, namely considering the fact the a person who thinks that Mind created the universe, along with being nonrelativistic, usually gets one the ‘crank’ label. I’m not an antirelativist, and Einstein happens to be one of my all time favorite scientists. However, when I see that Relativity seems to contradict Quantum theory, and when someone gives me a viable alternative without any known flaws in logic, and it appears to answer many of our own unknowns, I do become open to it. There’s no way I can discuss these theories on here since they would be considered to be junk on many sites, and it would require me to post an extremely large amount of words just to explain the basics. I do feel that Lerner’s Plasma theory has been debunked though, so I’m not in his camp.

rexacoracofalipitorius's avatar

@ETpro There isn’t anything outside the universe, because by definition there is no outside. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing there- just that there’s no “there” there.

@Paradox25 “Another scientist has maths which give the same results as Relativity theories do, but of course they’re stated differently.” So what? Liebniz discovered calculus independently of Newton, and he used different notation- but it’s still calculus.

“Higher velocities and stronger gravitational fields will affect the mechanisms that record time, such as quartz and casium beam atomic clocks.” Higher velocities relative to an observer affect the apparent passage of time. The recording mechanism doesn’t enter into it.

“It’s a similar concept concerning the longer lives of muons at higher velocities, because electromagnetic theories stated that atoms would dilate at a higher velocity.” What does this mean? Similar to what? Muons are not part of atoms, they are decay products.

“His formula concerning his concept of positive and negative mass primaries…”
What does this mean? What’s a ‘primary’ in this context?

”... (the very heart of his hypothesis) predicted that the expansion of the universe would be accelerating, and it predicted this some 6 full years before Hubble discovered it back in 1998.”
Edwin Hubble died in 1953.

“Several scientists also were interested in using a small capacitor (low farad capacity) in orbit at a high velocity to verify (if true) that an absolute speed could be recorded without depending upon relative speed.”
If this meant anything at all, then presumably it would invalidate general relativity? Hmm…

” A charged device will emit an electromagnetic field, so the capacitor’s oscillation rate (frequency) would change according to its velocity.”
A current flowing through a wire generates a magnetic field. A charged capacitor does not. The current has to flow in order that the field is generated. Also, capacitors don’t oscillate on their own, although they can be made to oscillate.

What you are talking about is not science. If you aren’t willing to defend your ideas, they can never be science. If you can’t design and perform an experiment to demonstrate the truth or falsehood of your ideas then they can never be science. Science isn’t about logic, it’s about models of the observable world. Science uses logic to form hypotheses and design experiments, but the Universe need not be logical (nor logically understandable to us.)

Paradox25's avatar

@rexacoracofalipitorius I meant the Hubble Telescope (which I think you already knew, and I’d mentioned the date anyways). I’m aware of how capacitors and electricity works, and I’ve worked as an electronic technician for many years, and I’m fully aware of what you need to do to charge and discharge a capacitor in a circuit using resistors, timers and other means. I know what electric and magnetic fields are too, and how they’re generated.
I’m still waiting for a response from the scientist about the details of his experiment concerning the oscillating capacitor, though the purpose of the experiment was to verify an absolute speed. When I get a full answer then I’ll post it here.

His point concerning Muons was the fact that when objects move at higher velocities, their characteristics can change. The fact is that time was a human construct, and one of pure logic using numbers long before Relative Time became accepted in science. We use mechanisms to record these timing values, such as clocks and timers. We depend upon these devices and their mechanics to record time for us. When we reset the timing on our satellites by a few hundred microseconds each day, or when clocks on moving jets give off a different time, the timing is obstructed due to electromechanical reasons, not due to a literal change in time itself. The time dilation formula will never acknowledge this because it only takes light speed, object speed and the numerical values concerning time itself into consideration. Of course your watch will slow down if you’re moving faster, because the mechanisms that record the manmade values known as time have to work harder. The mechanical parts responsible for recording time would work harder as well in a stronger gravitational field.

The concept of ‘primaries’ consisting of positive and negative mass ‘matter’ is purely analytical at this point, but it’s justified to me because it gives me a better understanding of what dark energy might really be, and like I’d said above this concept predicted the problem with the cosmological constant 6 years before Hubble Telescope discovered this. Do String Theories and the Multiverse explain the above problem/s any better than my idea? I’m not getting into these primaries here since a post about these would be rather technical and lengthy. I don’t want to get too far off topic here either, since the question was about nothingness, something which nobody really has the answer to at this time.

Apparently this guy had attempted to do what you’ve stated above, to either support or debunk a theory through experimentation and observation, concerning his proposed experiments, but he could never get the funding for them because he claimed that mainstream institutions were only interested in supporting Relativity Theories. If you want you can debate him yourself, one on one if you would like. Just let me know and I’ll give you the link since you seem so knowledgeable about this topic.

Science is a term which basically means knowledge, and this can extend to more than just what we consider to be the natural sciences. I don’t think that science is limited to any dogmatic pattern, as long as knowledge about how something works is acquired, and the process can be demonstrated and repeated. I’m pretty certain that I use the scientific method myself on a regular basis in my line of work. There are some very serious problems concerning reuniting Relativity with Quantum Theories. There are serious problems concerning the Big Bang Theory too, which I’d mentioned above. I’m not anti anything, but just trying to learn for myself.

The fact is most people don’t have the technical ability, including even many scientists, to understand just the basics of most fields of science. When most people state that they support evolutionary theories, the big bang theory, quantum theories, special relativity, general relativity, etc they are likely doing so on faith themselves, not knowledge. How many people are knowledgeable enough to truly understand why science supports the idea of humans evolving from lower life forms? Quantum theory itself requires a working knowledge of difficult maths, vectors and knowledge in other fields just to understand the basics.

What about the other theories I’ve mentioned too? Does the average person really know the pros and cons of each theory they claim to support? I’m an electronic technician, and I’ve worked with engineers who are only proficient to a certain extent. My entire rant here is to point out the fact that most people simply are not knowledgeable to make the statements that they make, including even on here, but we still ‘go’ with something regardless. I guess that in my somewhat limited ability to understand everything concerning science, that I just try to understand anyways.

ETpro's avatar

@rexacoracofalipitorius Then what does “there” mean?

I will leave it in your capable hands to discuss your other thoughts with @Paradox25.

rexacoracofalipitorius's avatar

@ETpro There’s no there there, but that’s neither here nor there. There, there. Hear, hear!

rexacoracofalipitorius's avatar

@Paradox25 I had meant to suggest that Edwin Hubble predicted that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. I had to go look it up, and I’m not entirely sure that it’s the case, but I believe that the equations involving the FLRW metric predict not only the expansion of the universe but also the second-order derivative (the acceleration) which was observed in 1998 as you said. Hubble’s observations (the man, not the telescope) had provided evidence for FLRW predictions back in the 1920s, which is what makes it relevant that he died in 1953, beating your unnnamed scientist’s beating the telescope to the punch.

I’m glad you’re an electronics tech and can build an oscillator. You are still wrong about capacitors and magnetic fields. The charge must move in order to induce a field. A charge on a plate doesn’t move.

I would very much like to check out the link you mention, so that I can better understand what you are talking about. I don’t promise I’ll be able to follow the math, but it sounds interesting.

I think it’s ok to “support” a scientific theory without a full understanding of it. In my mind, the theory is good as long as the predictions it makes are useful. I would hope that people don’t “believe” in scientific theories or have “faith” in them (even though I know that people have done and still do so.) People should always be willing to toss a theory aside in favor of new facts and better theories.

Paradox25's avatar

His proposed experiment required that the oscillator would be moving in order to record an absolute speed through space. I have a few questions myself to ask him, and I don’t know every thing about electricity myself. I’m much more familiar with transformers, motors and induction than I am concerning other areas. Not even an electrical engineer with a doctorate knows everything about electricity, and even they specialize in certain areas over others.

There are two threads you can reach Dr. Pearson on, the Yahoo Mavericks Club (very technical), and the other link I’ll give you. You need to sign up to be a member of the former site, but here you can just simply post a response or question, and he’ll get back to you. Many of the scientists on that site support the evidence for paranormal phenomena (which you’ll clearly see), but none of them are even remotely religious. There is little math on this site, and it’s specifically set up to address the average person’s questions.

All I’m going to say here is that I’m open, and open to even being wrong. Gravity appears to be the one force of nature that boggles these guys as well, unlike the other three forces. I’ve been reading many astronomy magazines and articles over the years telling me about a relativistic universe, cosmic strings, multiple dimensions, etc but I wanted to give a potentially viable hypothesis a chance if I found no flaws in logic.

mattbrowne's avatar

In set theory, it’s the empty set x = {} which a set of element with cardinality zero.

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