- P.L. Heath

Those who have puzzled most over why something should exist instead of nothing have left much eloquent testimony about those unexpected moments, fortunately short-lived, in which one is suddenly caught up in an overwhelming awareness of the utter mystery of why anything is.

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The mathematical theory behind Sam Loyd's sliding-block puzzle (15 unit cubes inside a 4-by-4 box) is best explained by regarding the hole as a moving cube.

Negative currents are the result of free electrons jostling one another along a conductor, but holes caused by an absence of free electrons can do the same thing, producing a positive "hole current" that goes the other way.

Lao-tzu writes in Chapter 11 of Tao Te Ching:

Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.

P A. M. Dirac, in his famous theory that predicted the existence of antiparticles, viewed the positron (antielectron) as a hole in a continuum of negative charge. When an electron and positron collide, the electron falls into the positron hole, causing both particles to vanish. This is an example of where nothing can be viewed as something.

Empty space is like a straight line of zero curvature. Bend the line, add little bumps that ripple back and forth, and you have a universe dancing with matter and energy. Outside the utmost fringes of our expanding cosmos are (perhaps) vast regions unpenetrated by light and gravity. Beyond those regions may be other universes. Shall we say that these empty regions contain nothing, or are they still saturated with a metric of zero curvature?

Greek and medieval thinkers argued about the difference between being and nonbeing, whether there is one world or many, whether a perfect vacuum can properly be said to "exist," whether God formed the world from pure nothing or first created a substratum of matter that was what St. Augustine called prope nihil, or close to nothing. Exactly the same questions were and are debated by philosophers and theologians of the East. When the god or gods of an Eastern religion created the world from a great Void, did they shape nothing or something that was almost nothing?

In 1951 Ad Reinhardt, a respected American abstractionist who died in 1967, began painting all-blue and all-red canvases. A few years later he moved to the ultimate-black. His all-black five-by-five-feet pictures were exhibited in 1963 in leading galleries in New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and London.
In 1965 Reinhardt had three simultaneous shows at top Manhattan galleries: one of all-blacks, one of all-reds, one of all-blues. Prices ranged from $1,500 to $12,000.
Since black is the absence of light, Reinhardt's black canvases come as close as possible to pictures of nothing, certainly much closer than the all-white canvases of Robert Rauschenberg and others.

There have been many plays in which principal characters say nothing. Has anyone ever produced a play or motion picture that consists, from beginning to end, of an empty stage or screen? Some of Andy Warhol's early films come very close to it.

John Cage's 4'33" is a piano composition that calls for four minutes and thirty-three seconds of total silence as the player sits frozen on the piano stool. The duration of the silence is 273 seconds. This corresponds, Cage has explained, to -273 degrees centigrade, or absolute zero, the temperature at which all mollecular motion quietly stops.

"Why," asked Leibniz, Schelling, Schopenhatier, and a hundred other philosophers, "should something exist rather than nothing?" Paul Edwards has called this the "superultimate question."

A group of philosophers, including Milton K. Munitz, who wrote an entire book titled The Mystery of Existence, regards the question "Why should something exist rather than nothing?" as being meaningful but insists that its significance lies solely in our inability to answer it.

Shifting to God the responsibility for the world's existence does not answer the question of why it exists instead of nothing; far from it! One immediately wonders why God exists rather than nothing.

Let P. L. Heath, said "If nothing whatsoever existed, there would be no problem and no answer, and the anxieties even of existential philosophers would be permanently laid to rest. Since they are not, there is evidently nothing to worry, about. But that itself should be enough to keep an existentialist happy. Unless the solution be, as some have suspected, that it is not nothing that has been worrying them, but they who have been worrying it."

Frederick Mosteller, a theoretical statistician at Harvard, made the following comments:

Ever since I was about fourteen years old I have been severely bothered by "Why should something exist rather than nothing?", and by and large not willing to talk to other people about it because the first few times i tried i got rather unexpected responses, mainly rather negative putdowns. It shook me up when it first occurred to me. and has bothered me again and again. I could not understand why it wasn't in the newspapers once a week I suppose, in a sense, all references to creation are a reflection of this same issue, but it is the simplicity of the question that seems to me so scary.

It seems so much more reasonable to me that there should be nothing than something that I have secretly concluded for myself that quite possibly physicists will ultimately prove that, were there a system containing nothing, it would automatically create a physical universe.

Extracts from Scientific American (most Feb 1975) by Martin Gardner

Many thanks!