Thinking about nothing in particular
June 7, 2015
I’ve always been interested in the question, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ I remember walking to school trying to imagine nothing: no planets, stars, or galaxies. (I’d seen these in an astronomy book and was inconsolable when the same book told me that the sun would one day engulf Earth). All I could think of was blackness, but I realised there would be no colour black so I imagined total blankness in white. Then I realised there would be no white either. Totally flummoxed, I gave up.
Perhaps the hardest thing to realise is there would be no observer. Every now and then, that question returns. I now think the question itself is part of the problem. We’re clearly confused about what ‘nothing’ is. We can’t even imagine it, let alone experience it, or measure it. One way of rethinking ‘nothing’ would be to see it as an extreme position on a spectrum, and give up the dualistic idea of something/nothing. Everything is marked by constant change: what we think of as void is teeming with possibility. Perhaps nothingness is nothing more than absolute potential.
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