Nothing

I thought I’d write a post and what came to mind?  Nothing!  So I am going to write about the fascinating subject of nothing.  I will search the universe high and low in pursuit of my topic.  I will define it as a complete absence of matter and energy in a 1m cube.  Along the way, I will assume infinite resources to construct any experiment, and a plentiful supply of ‘perfectium’, that very handy element I can give any absolute property I happen to need at the time.

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So I go to the shed and get a large cardboard carton and look inside and see nothing.  That was easy! and nothing found.  But wait a minute there is air inside.  OK, I’ll get a vacuum pump and suck the air out.  Oh bugger, that doesn’t work either as there are still a few atoms of air floating around, and the walls of the container will ‘out-gas’ a few atoms at a steady rate.  Nothing for it but to go into space where a very hard vacuum already exists.  But not near the sun where a powerful if tenuous solar wind is blowing, or even between stars in the galaxy as it is ‘packed’ with hydrogen, helium and dust.  No, lets go intergalactic to the empty places where galaxies don’t inhabit.  They are clumpy and stick in bunches so there are voids in between.  Oh rats!  There are still 2 or 3 atoms of hydrogen per cc.  Surely we can flush the last few atoms out with a few ‘scrubber’ molecules which absorb the last atoms and then stick to the sides.  At last! A cubic meter free of matter!

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But what about other stuff like the cosmic background radiation left over from the big bang that floods the universe still?  OK, this is where we need the perfectium.  A cubic meter of it impervious to microwave radiation such as the cosmic background.  Have you checked the price of perfectium recently?  We are getting into seriously expensive experiments here, conducted in intergalactic space with rare materials.  Right.  Cosmic background radiation blocked.  Phew!  Now look inside the box to see if we have nothing.  Oops!  You can’t look inside the box without disturbing Schrodinger’s paradox that you can’t observe without altering what you observe.  Quantum physics.  This is getting difficult.  And I have another problem.  I haven’t thought about neutrinos yet.  They stream out from the sun, from nuclear reactors and fantastic numbers of them still circulating from the big bang.  About a billion a second stream through your body every second.  Don’t worry, they are antisocial and don’t react with ‘real’ stuff like me and you.  They can go through about 2-3 light years of lead before they are likely (50-50%) to have anything to do with what we consider reality.  Perfectium to the rescue!  I now require it to be impervious to neutrinos, though I may have to make it a bit thicker.  This quest is much more difficult than expected.

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So here we are, at great expense out in the wilderness of intergalactic space, can’t even look in the box because of Schrodinger, and wondering if we have achieved nothing.  Actually, I seem to manage that most days, but in this analysis, it seems to elude me.  Then the final crushing blow.  Virtual particles.  In case you haven’t heard, quantum physics requires that particles spontaneously invent themselves out of nothing, have a brief jig, and disappear.  Anywhere in space.  At any time.  This is demonstrated in the Kirchhoff effect where two plates very close together have a positive attraction from the teaming virtual particles around them.  This is a seriously alarming thought, that a grand piano could spontaneously appear in orbit around Jupiter, then disappear again.  I’m losing my grip on reality, but that is a prerequisite to understanding the quantum world.  Relax Paul, enjoy the ride.

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So I have failed in my quest to find nothing.  It seems it can’t exist in this universe.  I wish I had come by this thought when I had teenage children.  When I asked them “what happened today?” and got the reply ‘nothing’, I could have regaled them with my recently acquired knowledge into the nature of nothing.  ‘Nothing does not exist’.  I don’t expect I would have been thanked for this revelation.

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For Martin.