Recently, I watched the “2013 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate on The Existence of Nothing”. This was a debate on what nothing was or if it even existed. Some of the greatest minds of our time (on the topic) were present, J. Richard Gott, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jim Holt, Lawrence Krauss, Charles Seife and Eva Silverstein were discussing the subject this day and made some very valid arguments.
At the end of the almost 2 hour discussion, there was no definitive answer, though I think they managed to indeed “kick the can further down the road”. They clarified that there is more than one “version” of nothing. To try to summarize, they described 4 nothings and understood that the term nothing is as vast as infinity. Some didn't agree at all and others agreed with everything, though they all at the end of the day, generally tried to dwindle the amount of things included in the matrix down (and even the matrix itself) in order to arrive at nothing.
Version one was simply the absence of matter, however, this left a vacuum, and energy.
Version two, solved this problem by taking away both the energy and the vacuum but now, we were faced with space and the laws of physics. This is still not quite “nothing”. Our Third option was shrinking down the universe and deleting space and the laws of physics. Most people would be satisfied with this answer, however at some point in time the big bang happened and… wait… did we say time? Yes, okay, this means that this version of nothing has time still in it. Time is in fact something.The fourth was simply an nondescript nothing nothing. Mathematically speaking "if you start with zero and remove it you get the null set" ( [ ] ).
To a great extent this reminds me of Seinfeld, the show. The reason I mention this is because Seinfeld was described as a show about nothing, but when you went to describe it the best way to do so was, in reality, to say it was a show about everything. Pardon my ignorance in the field (and please add a comment with the relevant sources if you happen to know them), but someone once said that if you look far away enough, you will be looking at the back of your head. The closest accepted version of this (to my knowledge) is the Misner space model, however this model believed that the back of the head you see is not your own, but a parallel you in a parallel universe. Michio Kaku explains this by saying that if the universe were small enough and you were to extend your arm and grab “your” parallel shoulder in another dimension, there would be a paralel you grabbing your shoulder behind you, but not really “you, you”. One of the best ways I have managed to visualize this without the need for “parallel universes” is with a “Toroidal Structure”, or fractal geometry. “Once you get down to nothing, you inevitably will find yourself staring down infinity” mentioned Charles Seife (I agreed).
Someone once posed the question of elemental particles and their validity. We first believed in molecules, then the basic subatomic particles (electron, proton, neutron), we then kept digging and came up with the “standard model” and further down we have quantum waves (also known as matter waves or de Broglie waves). Could it be possible that there is “no nothing” and all we have been doing is shattering reality? Like a glass ball that falls, it breaks into pieces, but each piece is not an individual perfect bit of building material, it is just part of a whole that was shattered. Shattering is completely different than dividing or decomposing for categorization purposes.
Another thing that I also think has been missing from this equation is awareness or to better categorize it, consciousness. True scientific analysis, positivism and solipsism force us to arrive at the conclusion that “only one's own mind is sure to exist”, however this has been absolutely discarded in modern science altogether, even though quantum mechanics states that matter only exists through awareness. If you don’t believe it, ask Schrödinger's cat. I am not saying that we have to agree with it, however, we should try to investigate this scientifically and perhaps this is the missing piece to “everythingness”, but then again, perhaps all it's good for is nothing.
Rafael Michelena