Is True Nothingness Even Possible?

What does nothing

contain?

On the Earth, a single cubic meter of

air isn't very much. It's roughly a

thousand lungfuls. And yet, compared to

the cosmic average, it's one of the

densest regions in the universe.

The largest creatures to swim through

this volume are the bacteria, drifting

with the winds and searching for a home.

Although some spend their entire lives

airborne, joining the bacteria is

microscopic detritus. Skin, snot, and

saliva exhaled and expelled from

creatures around the world. All the

complex molecular arrangements that

[music] our human senses reduced to

smells. And then there is the air

itself. Diatomic nitrogen and oxygen,

carbon dioxide, water vapor, a host of

less common molecules like methane and

ozone. But that is still not all.

Roughly every second, a cosmic ray

passes through that cubic volume.

Produced by some high energy process in

the distant [music] cosmos like an

exploding star or collapsing black hole.

This particle will have sailed

unmolested for billions of years only to

meet its final end colliding with some

unlucky air molecule. There is also

[music] radiation constant and

ubiquitous of wavelengths up and down

the electromagnetic spectrum. The

visible light from the sun shining

above, the infrared heat from the ground

below, the stray X-ray and gamma ray

coursing in from the wider cosmos, and

the sloshing microwave and radio waves

carrying messages and signals from one

side of the globe to the other. That's

without mentioning the particles that

almost never make their presence known.

The thousand trillion neutrinos, the

everpresent dark matter.

And so what would happen if you stripped

all of that away? What if we managed to

remove every single molecule, atom,

particle, and photon of radiation? Could

we make absolutely nothing? Not just

emptiness, not just a vacuum, but pure

nothingness.

The journey [music] to discover the

answer to this question is a strange

one. One that will take us from simple

vacuum pumps to the beginning of the

universe, from ancient philosophical

ponderings to the bleeding edge of

theoretical [music] physics.

And this is because the question can

nothing exist has a twin.

Why are we here?

The Dextra robot, part of Canada's

contribution to the International Space

Station, is operated remotely from

Earth. Named Dextra because it is

Dextrous. Controllers at the Canadian

Space Ay's headquarters in Quebec can

guide its two multi-jointed arms using

live video, eliminating the need for

spacew walks and allowing the astronauts

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The year is 1654 and Otto Vongerka is

gently dabbing the sweat from his brow.

Standing before the emperor of the Holy

Roman Empire himself, he raises his hand

and gives the signal. Everything rests

[music] on this moment. There is a loud

winnieing and dust billows into the air

as his two teams of horses heave into

action, pulling in opposite directions

and straining the ropes that connect

them. The two sets of eight are evenly

matched and very little progress is made

as the struggling beasts strain and

sweat digging their hooves into the

dirt. But no matter how hard they

struggle, absolutely nothing happens.

Otto smiles. It's all going according to

plan.

Otto Vongerka was the Burgermeister of

Magnabberg, a city in what was then the

Holy Roman Empire. In addition to his

attempts to help his home recover from a

brutal sacking 20 years before by

Catholic forces, [music] he was also

intensely curious about the latest

philosophical thinking, including the

increasing popularity of the new [music]

heliocentric model of the universe. And

this was connected to his experiment by

a feature of the old geocentric model

that had the earth at its center. In

that model, the universe [music]

contained no voids. The earth had

instead been surrounded by a nested

series of crystalline spheres that

carried the objects of the heavens with

no gaps between them. Beyond [music]

that was heaven itself.

Yet in the heliocentric model, the

planets themselves were physical bodies

that moved through something. And what

that something was wasn't exactly clear.

It wasn't air. Otherwise, we should all

feel the rush of wind as the earth moved

with great speed.

And so then what was it? Could it be

nothing?

Indeed, the question of whether nothing

was even possible and by extension a

vacuum had long baffled scientists and

philosophers.

Ancient Greek [music] schools had not

managed to reach consensus. On one side

had been the atomists led by figures

such as Democrus who divided the

universe into two basic components.

The atoms and the [music] void.

The atoms combined in a multitude of

ways to make up reality, creating

everything from skin and sweat to light

and air to emotions and thoughts. The

void, however, was pure emptiness. The

stage, [music] so to speak, through

which the atoms moved, giving the

universe its basic foundation.

But opposing the atomists was another

line of thinking led by none other than

Aristotle [music] himself. Aristotle,

like his mentor Plato, outright rejected

the concept of the void and [music] the

vacuum. The vacuum could not be

ascertained by the senses. You couldn't

smell [music] it, see it, or touch it.

And so, if you could not encounter

something, could it truly exist? And if

that argument wasn't enough, air

expanded to fill every volume of space

[music] and container. If you tried to

create a vacuum, air would simply rush

in to fill it. [music]

In other words, nature abhored a vacuum.

In Muslim and Western traditions, this

authorative voice of Aristotle had

echoed throughout the centuries with the

horror vacui, the abhorance of the

vacuum becoming the accepted wisdom. And

so by 1277, as French Bishop Etien Toier

began his pope approved quest to put the

mystery to bed once and for all, the

very idea of a vacuum seemed an affront

to all that is holy. His investigations

had been set off by a simple theological

debate taking place within the

University of Paris.

Could God create a vacuum? After all,

the Almighty was almighty and was

capable of doing anything. but vacuums.

Nothing simply could not exist. Could

God create something that could not