Ask A Genius 1195: NOTHING, Nothing, nothing, nothingness, and “What else can we talk about?”
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/11/13
*Interview conducted in November, 2024.*
Rick Rosner: I’ve been feeling bad about our recent conversations because it’s mostly me complaining about Trump. So, I tried to think more philosophically or metaphysically for a moment. We’ve often talked about the principles of existence and things that can exist, but that made me wonder: what about things that can’t exist? Is there anything productive in thinking about things that are impossible?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I have an example. When I interviewed Lawrence Krauss, he spoke as a popularizer of physics with a quasi-philosophical approach to the concept of nothing. His perspective was that, to define nothing, you must first define something. This helps move away from traditional, philosophical, or somewhat religious assumptions of a vast, empty black void.
So, if you want to define nothing, you start by defining something. Understanding the physics of something lets you deconstruct it piece by piece until you reach nothing.
Rosner: I had a similar thought: there are two kinds of things that don’t exist. One type is the things that could potentially exist but are at odds with your current location in the universe.
And the farther you go from where you are—across billions of light-years—you reach things that become less defined relative to you, with less of a shared history. This early, undefined stuff looks ancient because it hasn’t had a chance to co-evolve with you.
I wonder if, quantum mechanically, that’s a complete set of all possible existences and non-existences. Does everything that can either exist or mostly not exist lie on a continuum from 0% existence to 100%—as fully existent as it can be because it’s local to you?
So, that’s thought one. But that wasn’t exactly the Lawrence Krauss thought. I was trying to imagine things that don’t exist. For instance, I pictured Abraham Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address, but with one hand extended. Above his hand, hovering an inch above it, is a metallic cube defying gravity. That can’t exist—it contradicts reality. Abraham Lincoln did not give the Gettysburg Address with an outstretched hand holding a hovering metallic cube.
r with eight fingers on one hand while delivering the speech. That makes me wonder: can we only conceive of things that don’t exist by rearranging elements from our imaginations, which are built from things that do exist, into configurations that are absurd or contrary to known reality? What I’m asking is whether everything that doesn’t exist, in this sense, is just a peculiar combination of things that do exist. It seems reasonable to assume that everything we can imagine is derived from things we’ve learned about—things that exist in some form. That’s close to what Krauss was saying.
Though he was talking in much stricter physical terms.
Rosner: No, not at the moment. What else can we talk about?
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