The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe

A leading mathematician and cosmologist explores the concept of nothingness, from the origins of zero in ancient India, through changing ideas about nothing from ancient Greece to the present day, to attempts by modern mathematics, cosmology, theology, and physics to explain the role of "nothing" in the structure of the universe. 35,000 first printing.

Nothingology —
Flying to Nowhere

'Nothing', it has been said, 'is an awe-inspiring yet essentially undigested concept, highly esteemed by writers of a mystical or existentialist tendency, but by most others regarded with anxiety, nausea, and panic.'Nobody seems to know how to handle it and perplexingly diverse conceptions of it exist in different subjects.Just take a look at the entry for 'nothing' in any good dictionary and you will find a host of perplexing synonyms: nil, none, nowt, nulliform, nullity — there is a nothing for every occasion. There are noughts of all sorts to zero-in on, from zero points to zero hours, ciphers to nulliverses.There are concepts that are vacuous, places that are evacuated, and voids of all shapes and sizes. On the more human side, there are nihilists, nihilianists, nihilarians, nihilagents, nothingarians, nullifideans, nullibists,nonentities and nobodies. Every walk of life seems to have its own personification of nothing. Even the financial pages of my newspaper tell me that 'zeros'are an increasingly attractive source of income.

Some zeros seem positively obscure, almost circumlocutory. Tennis can't bring itself to use so blunt a thing as the word 'nil' or 'nothing' or 'zero' to record no score. Instead, it retains the antique term 'love', which has reached us rather unromantically from l'oeuf, the French for an egg which represented the round 0 shape of the zero symbol.Likewise, we still find the use of the term 'love' meaning 'nothing' as when saying you are playing for love (rather than money), hence the distinction of being a true 'amateur', or the statement that one would not do something 'for love or money', by which we mean that we could not do it under any circumstances. Other games have evolved anglicised versions of this anyone-for-tennis pseudonym for zero: 'goose egg' is used by American ten-pin bowlers to signal a frame with no pin knocked down. In England there is a clear tradition for different sports to stick with their own measure of no score, 'nil' in soccer, 'nought' in cricket, but 'ow' in athletics timings, just like a telephone number, or even James Bond's serial number. But sit down at your typewriter and 0 isn't O any more.

'Zilch' became a common expression for zero during the Second World War and infiltrated 'English' English by the channel of US military personnel stationed in Britain. Its original slang application was to anyone whose name was not known. Another similar alliterative alternative was 'zip'. A popular comic strip portrays an owl lecturing to an alligator and an infant rabbit on a new type of mathematics, called 'Aftermath', in which zero is the only number permitted; all problems have the same solution — zero — and consequently the discipline consists of discovering new problems with that inevitable answer.

Another curiosity of language is the use of the term 'cipher' to describe someone who is a nonentity ('a cipher in his own household', as an ineffectual husband and father was once described). Although a cipher is now used to describe a code or encryption involving symbols, it was originally the zero symbol of arithmetic. Here is an amusing puzzle which plays on the double meaning of cipher as a code and a zero:

"U 0 a 0, but I 0 thee
O 0 no 0, but O 0 me.
O let not my 0 a mere 0 go,
But 0 my 0 I 0 thee so."

which deciphers to read

"You sigh for a cipher, but I sigh for thee
O sigh for no cipher, but O sigh for me.
O let not my sigh for a mere cipher go,
But sigh for my sigh, for I sigh for thee so."

The source of the insulting usage of cipher is simple: the zero symbol of arithmetic is one which has no effect when added or subtracted to anything. One Americanisation of this is characteristically racier and derives from modern technical jargon. A null operation is technospeak for an action that has no consequence. Your computer cycles through millions of them while it sits waiting for you to make the next keystroke. It is a neutral internal computer operation that performs no calculation or data manipulation. Correspondingly, to say that someone 'is a zero, a real null op' needs no further elucidation. Of course, with the coming of negative numbers new jokes are possible, like that of the individual whose personality was so negative that when he walked into a party, the guests would look around and ask each other 'who left?' or the scientist whose return to the country was said to have added to the brain drain. The adjective 'napoo', meaning finished or empty, is a contraction of the French il n'y a plus, for 'there is nothing left'.
Not all nominal associations with 'nothing' were derogatory. Sometimes they had a special purpose. When some of the French Huguenots fled to Scotland to escape persecution by Louis XIV they sought to keep their names secret by using the surname Nimmo, derived from the Latin ne mot, meaning no one or no name.

Our system of writing numbers enables us to build up expressions for numbers of unlimited size simply by adding more and more noughts to the right-hand end of any number: 11230000000000 . . . During the hyperinflationary period of the early 1920s, the German currency collapsed in value so that hundreds of billions of marks were needed to stamp a letter. The economist John K. Galbraith writes of the psychological shock induced by these huge numbers with their strings of zeros:

"'Zero stroke' or 'cipher stroke' is the name created by German physicians for a prevalent nervous malady brought about by the present fantastic currency figures. Scores of cases of the 'stroke' are reported among men and women of all classes, who have been prostrated by their efforts to figure in thousands of millions. Many of these persons apparently are normal, except for a desire to write endless rows of ciphers."

Pockets of hyperinflation persist around the globe; indeed there are more zeros around today than at any other time in history. The introduction of binary arithmetic for computer calculation, together with the profusion of computer codes for the control of just about everything, has filled machines with 0s and 1s. Once you had a ten per cent chance of happening upon a zero, now it's evens. But there are huge numbers that are now almost commonplace. Everyone knows there are billions and billions of stars, and national debts conjure up similar astronomical numbers. Yet we have found a way to hide the zeros: 109 doesn't look as bad as 1,000,000,000.

The sheer number of synonyms for 'nothing' is in itself evidence of the subtlety of the idea that the words try to capture. Greek, Judaeo-Christian, Indian and Oriental traditions all confronted the idea in different ways which produced different historical threads. We will find that the concept of nothingness that developed in each arena merely to fill some sort of gap then took on a life of its own and found itself describing a something that had great importance. The most topical example is the physicists' concept of nothing — the vacuum. It began as empty space — the void, survived Augustine's dilution to 'almost nothing', turned into a stagnant ether through which all the motions in the Universe swam, vanished in Einstein's hands, then re-emerged in the twentieth-century quantum picture of how Nature works. This perspective has revealed that the vacuum is a complex structure that can change its character in sudden or gradual ways. Those changes can have cosmic effects and may well have been responsible for endowing the Universe with many of its characteristic features. They may have made life a possibility in the Universe and one day they may bring it to an end.

When we read of the difficulties that the ancients had in coming to terms with the concept of nothing, or the numeral for zero, it is difficult to put oneself in their shoes. The idea now seems commonplace. But mathematicians and philosophers had to undergo an extraordinary feat of mental gymnastics to accommodate this everyday notion. Artists took rather longer to explore the concepts of Nothing that emerged. But, in modern times, it is the artist who continues to explore the paradoxes of Nothing in ways that are calculated to shock, surprise or amuse.

Nothing Ventured
In the 1950s artists began to explore the limiting process of going from polychrome to monochrome to nullichrome. The American abstract artist Ad Reinhardt produced canvases coloured entirely red or blue, before graduating to a series of five-foot square all-black productions that toured the leading galleries in America, London and Paris in 1963. Not surprisingly, some critics condemned him as a charlatan but others admired his art noir: 'an ultimate statement of esthetic purity', according to American art commentator Hilton Kramer.Reinhardt went on to run separate exhibitions of his all-red, all-blue and all-black canvases and writes extensively about the raison d'être for his work.It is a challenge to purists to decide whether Reinhardt's all-black canvases capture the representation of Nothing more completely than the all-white canvases of Robert Rauschenberg. Personally, I prefer the spectacular splash of colours in Jasper Johns' The Number Zero.

The visual zero did not need to be explicitly represented by paint or obliquely signalled by its absence. The artists of the Renaissance discovered the visual zero for themselves in the fifteenth century and it became the centrepiece of a new representation of the world that allowed an infinite number of manifestations. The 'vanishing point' is a device to create a realistic picture of a three-dimensional scene on a flat surface. The painter fools the eye of the viewer by imagining lines which connect the objects being represented to the viewer's eye. The canvas is just a screen that intervenes between the real scene and the eye. Where the imaginary lines intersect that screen, the artist places his marks. Lines running parallel to the screen are represented by parallel lines which recede to the line of the distant hor...