What is "nothing"? Is it "something"?

I put this in GD because it has to do with the beginning of our universe.

I was watching ‘The Unbelievers’ on Netflix, and **I’m pretty sure **there was a brief clip of Lawrence Krauss on ‘The Colbert Report’ claiming that “Nothing” is something different than what we think of it to be. Colbert Joked that if God was “nothing” than couldn’t something, (the universe) have come from him?

It was funny, but I wanted to hear more about what “nothing” was. What is “nothing”? I’m an atheist, but I’ve never been able to think of an example where something came to be by nothing. Could anyone help me understand this a little better?

Remember, the opposite of “Something” isn’t “Nothing”, it’s “Anti-Something”; “Nothing” is just like the number 0, which is right smack dab in the middle between all of the positive and negative numbers. To create something from nothing, all you have to do is create an equal amount of anti-something.

Or something like that.

First of all, ‘nothing’ is very hard to talk about. That is because, whenever we use sentences like ‘x is green’, we are actually proposing an existence statement, i.e. we’re saying ‘there is something that is x, and that something is green’. But when we say things about nothing, then we’re automatically not talking about nothing—when we say, for instance, ‘nothing is very hard to talk about’, then we’re saying ‘there is something that is nothing, and that something is very hard to talk about’. But of course, that’s nonsense: nothing is not something; something is the opposite of nothing!

Now, in contemporary, popular discourse on the matter, people often define something that they want to call ‘nothing’—the vacuum of space, for example (as in ‘particle creation from nothing’ in quantum field theory), or a closed pseudo-Riemannian manifold of zero radius (as in certain universe-creation scenarios), or whatever else. Now, all these things simply aren’t nothing (no matter what Lawrence Krauss tries to sell you). They’re somethings. How do I know? Because they have properties—if it has properties, it’s not nothing, because properties are what makes something a something. It’s not nothing if it’s, say, green—only things can be green. Likewise, it’s not nothing if it has a metric signature, etc.

But then, how do we talk about nothing? I think there is a possibility, which can be brought out by algorithmic information theory (AIT). AIT essentially concerns the question of how much information a given thing has, and approaches it by quantifying how difficult it is to describe—more formally, how long the smallest computer program is that produces that thing. There’s some technical niceties with that definition, which I will however not bore you with; for the moment, let’s just take it as a well-defined quantity that, for a given object, tells us how much information is contained in its description.

Now, let’s suppose that we weren’t interested in nothing, but instead, in everything. What’s the information content of everything? Well, as it turns out, there is a very small program that outputs every possible object—even very complex ones, which on their own can only be output by a very long program.

By analogy, consider a library that contains ‘every book with exactly 100,000 characters’. That single sentence contains all the information needed to, should you choose to do so, create the whole library, book for book. Nevertheless, there are books in it that can’t be described by a something that’s appreciably shorter than the book itself—think just how, for every abbreviated description you give, there will in general be several books differing in just some minute detail which fit the description. So somehow, collecting all those high-information things yields a very low-information thing.

Now suppose you increase the number of allowed letters without bound; still, the description of the whole library will be a very short one, and in fact, the ratio between description and size of the library will tend to zero; thus, the ‘library of every book’ will contain asymptotically zero information.

Now, a fundamental result in AIT is that every set contains as much information as its complement, that is, the set of things not in the original set. For example, if you have a set of apples that are either red or green, you can describe a subset either by ‘all the green apples’, or, ‘all the not-red apples’. If you know how to pick out the red apples, you also know how to pick out the green ones, and vice versa.

But now we know that everything has asymptotically no information, and we have a specification of everything; but then, we also have a specification of the complement of everything. And what’s the complement of everything? Right, nothing. So for the description of nothing, we only need the description of everything. Both contain exactly the same information.

This has an odd consequence for the issue of creationg from nothing: namely, creating something from nothing is the same as deleting something from everything. To illustrate, assume you take one book out of the library of every book. How do you describe the new library, sans the book you took out? Well, you take your original specification of the library, and describe what book you took out, i.e. you say ‘the library of everything, minus book x’. The question is, how do you describe book x?

Well, every consistent way of labelling the books in the infinite library will have entries that have just as much information as the book they are labelling (on average). That means, just from knowing the book’s entry in the library catalogue, you can recreate the entire book. Thus, the description of the library without some book is at the same time a description of the book itself, just as the description of the whole library is also a description of nothing. So describing the whole library with one book missing is the same as describing only the book—deleting the book from the everything library is the same as creating it from nothing.

In fact, whenever you in some way partition the everything library in two, you essentially create information; the everything library on its own does not contain any information, but each part of it does, thus, if you throw away one part, or make it otherwise inaccessible, what you’re left with will have some nonzero information content, which has been created from no information at all.

So, to sum up, talking about nothing is the same as talking about everything; deleting something from everything is the same as creating something from nothing (informationally speaking). The question then is, if I keep on writing like this, and my post ultimately becomes infinitely long—will I have said everything, or nothing? :stuck_out_tongue:

There isn’t one definition. A lack of information on a topic is one kind of “nothing,” but it’s a something by inference of what it’s not.

Nothing in absolute physical terms is a concept, not a something.

No.

Cite.

I think he means along the lines of nothing.

Along lines of.

1 space is empty all black , no planets ,stars ,comets,rocks or gas clouds all black.

2.Before the universe nothing no planets ,stars ,comets,rocks or gas clouds all black.

3.When you die no hell,heaven ,dimensions or higher plane. Nothing all black.

4.Think of nothing

5.Dream nothing
Is hard for brain to understand nothing.

Of course you can’t think of an example, because you’ve never had a “nothing” to see if anything can come of it. We don’t know whether something can come from nothing, because no one has ever seen nothing.

We have examples of particles popping up in empty space, but empty space is actually something - it has properties. “Nothing” has no properties - if it did, it wouldn’t be nothing.

From what I understand, several theories in modern physics posit that “nothing” is not just hard to conceptualize, it’s completely impossible. That is, if there were no universe, nothing in existence, a universe would form automatically in such a spontaneous timeframe as to make “nothing” not exist.

We conceptualize things in terms of what we know and understand. We can conceptualize a tree because we can see a tree, we can touch, feel, smell, even taste a tree. We can conceptualize a “mega-tree” from Rick and Morty because of what we already understand the implications of how it is colored, textured, and generally what is implied there. We can understand all sorts of bizarre concepts because we have experienced more down-to-earth concepts.

We cannot, however, even begin to compare things we’ve experienced to “nothing”. It’s a paradox - as long as we’re there, there is no “nothing”. The entire concept is so completely beyond our grasp that it rather begs the question of if it is even coherent in the first place. And quantum physics seems to imply that that might not be the case.

Indeed, the conclusion of scientists like Krauss is that there is no such thing as “Nothing”
Obligatory link to the explanation in physics made in QI, from Stephen Fry and Ben Miller

The clip is short, but at the end of the section Stephen Fry commented:

[QUOTE=Stephen Fry]
So there is no such thing as nothing, arguably anyway; on the other hand, if you want to disagree, there is nothing to stop you. :slight_smile:
[/QUOTE]
:smiley:

Bravo! That made for great reading.

Informative and entertaining! Thank you for your amazing reply!

Here you go – a two hour discussion of the nature of nothing with Neil Degrasse Tyson, Lawrence Krause and 4 other physicists or academics.

Aw, shucks. It’s nothing, really.