Nothing

'Nothing', used as a pronoun subject, denotes the absence of a something or particular thing that one might expect or desire to be present ('We found nothing,' 'Nothing was there') or the inactivity of a thing or things that are usually or could be active ('Nothing moved,' 'Nothing happened'). As a predicate or complement 'nothing' denotes the absence of meaning, value, worth, relevance, standing, or significance ('It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing'; 'The affair meant nothing'; 'I'm nothing in their eyes'). 'Nothingness' is a philosophical term that denotes the general state of nonexistence, sometimes reified as a domain or dimension into which things pass when they cease to exist or out of which they may come to exist, e.g., God is understood to have created the universe ex nihilo, 'out of nothing.' Some would consider the study of 'nothing' to be foolish. A typical response of this type is voiced by Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) in conversation with his landlord, one Dr. Gozzi, who also happens to be a priest: However, 'nothingness' has been treated as a serious subject for a very long time. In philosophy, to avoid linguistic traps over the meaning of 'nothing', a phrase such as not-being is often employed to make clear what is being discussed. One of the earliest Western philosophers to consider nothing as a concept was Parmenides (5th century BC), who was a Greek philosopher of the monist school. He argued that 'nothing' cannot exist by the following line of reasoning: To speak of a thing, one has to speak of a thing that exists. Since we can speak of a thing in the past, this thing must still exist (in some sense) now, and from this he concludes that there is no such thing as change. As a corollary, there can be no such things as coming-into-being, passing-out-of-being, or not-being. Parmenides was taken seriously by other philosophers, influencing, for instance, Socrates and Plato. Aristotle gives Parmenides serious consideration but concludes; 'Although these opinions seem to follow logically in a dialectical discussion, yet to believe them seems next door to madness when one considers the facts.' In modern times, Albert Einstein's concept of spacetime has led many scientists, including Einstein himself, to adopt a position remarkably similar to Parmenides. On the death of his friend Michele Besso, Einstein consoled his widow with the words 'Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For those of us that believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.' Leucippus (early 5th century BC), one of the atomists, along with other philosophers of his time, made attempts to reconcile this monism with the everyday observation of motion and change. He accepted the monist position that there could be no motion without a void. The void is the opposite of being. It is not-being. On the other hand, there exists something known as an absolute plenum, a space filled with matter, and there can be no motion in a plenum because it is completely full. But, there is not just one monolithic plenum, for existence consists of a multiplicity of plenums. These are the invisibly small 'atoms' of Greek atomist theory, later expanded by Democritus (circa 460 BC – 370 BC), which allows the void to 'exist' between them. In this scenario, macroscopic objects can come-into-being, move through space, and pass into not-being by means of the coming together and moving apart of their constituent atoms. The void must exist to allow this to happen, or else the 'frozen world' of Parmenides must be accepted. Bertrand Russell points out that this does not exactly defeat the argument of Parmenides but, rather, ignores it by taking the rather modern scientific position of starting with the observed data (motion, etc.) and constructing a theory based on the data, as opposed to Parmenides' attempts to work from pure logic. Russell also observes that both sides were mistaken in believing that there can be no motion in a plenum, but arguably motion cannot start in a plenum. Cyril Bailey notes that Leucippus is the first to say that a 'thing' (the void) might be real without being a body and points out the irony that this comes from a materialistic atomist. Leucippus is therefore the first to say that 'nothing' has a reality attached to it.