When you stop to think about it the concept of nothing or rather nothingness is truly a mind boggling conception. Most people equate the idea of nothing with empty and that is certainly one valid historical meaning but nothingness is much more (or perhaps I should say much less) than empty. In fact the word empty is meaningless where nothingness is involved. Nothingness means there not only is no energy or matter but there isn’t even space. That is, there are no dimensions, no time, no …, well there is nothing!

Why come up with this weird concept of nothingness? Actually it is an offshoot of modern cosmology or as it is more popularly called the ‘big bang” theory. There is a large mass of empirical evidence that indicates that our universe is expanding and was created about 14 billion years ago. Much of the evidence is technical and I won’t discuss it in detail but cosmologists now have a basic understanding of the evolution of the universe from about a half a second after creation until the present but this begs the fundamental question; namely. where did the universe come from?

Science doesn’t actually say anything about where the universe comes from except to say it started as a “singularity“. Currently the “best answer” seems to be it came or sprang up from nothing! Hence the mind boggling concept of nothingness! The problem is that this answer isn’t testable so it can’t be a scientific theory (at best it is hypothesis) but if you are inclined to accept it then it has a vast number of implications.

Let’s start with the simplest and most obvious implication. If our universe sprang up from nothingness then why didn’t other universes spring up? Well , perhaps they did. This has given rise to various muti-universe hypothesis (erroneously but frequently called theories) in which each universe has its own properties such as physical laws, constants, dimensions and so on. In this view universes may be constantly created and destroyed out of nothing. This hypothesis has also been used to give credence to the anthropic principle in order to explain why we live in a universe where we can exist.

What kind of universes? Who knows! Perhaps there are no others. Maybe we’re unique. Perhaps there are other universes like ours as often depicted in science fiction but restricting our imagination to only considering an infinite number of universes that are not only like ours but parallel to ours indicates a very narrow vision of the potential possibilities. After all if we are going to create something out of nothing then we can imagine anything we want.

Unfortunately none of these hypothesis can be considered scientific. Some are dressed up to look scientific by making them compatible with our current scientific knowledge but these attempts ignore the crucial ingredient of testability (e.g., making testable predictions). Furthermore they ignore the fact that the very fabric of our universe, namely space dimensions and time, are universe dependent. Properties like these may not even exist in other potential universes while attributes we cannot even conceive may be properties of another universe.

Take time for example. Time is a particular property of our universe and our experience with time gives rise to such concepts as a beginning of time, an end of time, eternal, etc. These concepts would have no meaning in a universe without time. In fact saying things like “universes may be created all the time”, “the duration of some universes are momentary or infinite”, or even trying to specify an order when the various universes are created is meaningless because nothingness has no time or order. I suppose in this sense you could say nothing is out of time.

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Tags: religion, Science

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