Believers, non-believers and nothing

One thing that seems to be common to theists and atheists is nothing. Both sides hate it. Believers cannot accept the idea of nothing, since that would mean a situation where God is not present. Atheists have a similar problem with the idea of the universe being formed from nothing. For both, there was always something. For believers, it is God; for atheists/scientists it is energy, according to the First Law of Thermodynamics that states that energy cannot be created or destroyed.

Nothing in music

John Cage (1912-1992), seminal figure of the American avant-garde, composed in 1952, a work (4'33") that consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.

Is silence “music”? Certainly not according to Victor Hugo, whose opinion was that “music expresses that which cannot be spoken and cannot be kept silent.” Yet Cage's idea was not to produce silence, but the making of sounds coming from the audience themselves, who were suddenly aware of sounds from within themselves and from around them. It was, in today's terms, an early form of interactive art.

Can silent music be art? Is it music? Or is it, in fact, nothing?

Nothing in the Sopranos

To howls of rage, the Supranos final episode ended in a black fade-out on June 11. For me, though, it was the pefect ending. It ended as does all life: in nothingness. A neat interpretation is that we see the world through Tony's eyes. There are certainly enough hints in the last scene that he would get killed. If he did, then he didn't see it coming. The screen and sound went dead because Tony did. That was it. The end. Nothing.

The end was as good a piece of conceptual art as the black squares painted by Ad Reinhart in the 1960s. In fact, better, since the Soprano's blackness came in contrast to the life that came before. It was a perfect interpretation of nothingness.

Is nothing something?

The point of nothing - to paraphrase Bertrand Russell on philosophy - is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth examining, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

There is more to nothing than meets the eye. What I want to do, with those who want to contribute here, is to try to discover what it is all about, while showing that thinking about nothing means thinking about everything. History, philosophy, religion, art, literature, politics, science - all are touched by nothing. Who could have believed that nothing would turn out to be so interesting, so laden with intrigue, mystery and hidden information?

There is nothing frivolous about nothing; it is pivotal in many subjects and has been examined with various degrees of respect and wonder through the ages. Theologians had been disturbed by it and worried about the concept of creating something out of nothing. It was a difficult topic for Greek philosophers, Medieval and Late Ancient thinkers and for mathematicians. Far from being nothing to worry about, it was a concept that threatened the foundation of what people held dear. The Greeks were scared of it and Aristotle wouldn’t permit it, so that due to the Catholic Church’s embrace of Aristotelianism, Western science and mathematics were held back for centuries.

What is this nothing, that we can’t actually see, touch or feel? Is it absolute? Is it relative to everything else? If we are able to think about it, is it something, and if so wouldn’t it not be nothing?

This is precisely the mystery of nothing – that the more we think about it, the more there is to it.

So is nothing something?