… I got nothin’.
Scientific American has on-line archives (for subscribers, but with previews) and a search engine, yielding for examples:
[ul][li] The Nothingness of Earth; March 5, 1846 [no preview][/li][li] Martin Gardner Feb 1975, “How the absence of anything leads to thoughts of nothing” [no preview][/li][li] Is Time an Illusion?[/li][li] Physicists Debate the Many Varieties of Nothingness[/li][li] Thinkers Talk about Nothing[/li][li] et cetera[/li][/ul]
Other than that, I got nuthin’.
I started a GD thread on the topic a few years ago. I’d held that the fact there exists something—anything—means absolute nothingness (zero matter, energy, space, time, virtual particles, etc.: absolutely nothing) is impossible.
But lately I’m not so sure.
But is it that simple? Unicorns, tribbles, hobbits, sessile grogs, these things, as far as we know, do not have real, physical form. Yet, they can be described, and people have depicted them verbally, graphically or in sculpture. In that respect, their true non-existence is debatable. Physical absence is not sufficient to define “nothing”. In fact, even quarks may not exist by the standard of having a physical presence, as they are merely a theoretical model used to resolve observed particle behavior. Thus, since we can talk about nothing, it must therefore non-exist, which addresses the question of the thread: “nothing” is indeed (not) something.
Here is an interesting discussion of Nothing with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Laurence Krause, and some other physicists. Been a while since I saw it, but IIRC there were at least three different kinds of nothing.
Forgot to mention – need answer fast? This may not be for you – it’s nearly 2 hours, and all specifically about Nothing. Or perhaps Something pretending to be Nothing.
Cheating by re-watching at work – turns out “nothing” is a Christian concept. For example, there is no zero in Roman numerals. Before Christians, the universe was conceived of arising from chaos – disorganized “stuff”. But then the idea arose that God was so powerful he could create something from nothing.
Thanks, Clothahump! That Gahan Wilson masterpiece is exactly what I thought of when I saw this thread.
Rather than bump the eight-year-old Absence/Emptiness as a theme in art perhaps this link will do to suggest another side to the nothingness issue.
Or you could have seen that they were all tautology with “empty set”,which was given…
eg A string is an ordered set ( of characters) - a computer programming concepts.
eg a graph is a set of points, that define the line
Well then you’d realise you hit something more unique than that.
" a zero tuple"- well thats a little more abstract Not only is an empty, it couldn’t have anything in it.
Well, an empty string is not nothing, it is an actual string, but with no content. It is represented either with a length prefix of zero, a terminator character, or a null pointer, but it is nonetheless represented in some way, and it can be meaningful (in a call, it often indicates either that a default value should be used or that a field should be cleared).
Similarly, the value 0 is not nothing. It occupies a point on the numeric continuum, has a greater value that -1, and is the crucial limit in the derivative algorithm. When you divide by zero, crazy-ass stuff happens, so it is clearly not nothing.
Empty things are merely things which are empty. In C, one often encounters routines that expect *void , or a pointer to void, which technically points to nothing (literally, points to a theoretical series of bytes) but serves as a sort of placeholder for a pointer that points to something.
Things which lack content are not nothing, they are things, and their content is not nothing, it is just stuff that is missing.
All I know is nothing from nothing leaves nothing, and ya gotta have something, if ya wanna be with me, Yeah!
Could you speak up, cmyk? I can’t hear a word you’re saying. 
Should I dance, Siam Sam?