Much Ado About Nothing

Why is there something rather than nothing? That’s the existential question asked by Jim Holt in his book Why Does the World Exist? Holt interviews philosophers, physicists and theologians and summarizes their positions while mixing in his own thoughts. I will admit that some parts of the book feel like a drag. Perhaps I don’t appreciate the finer points of philosophy. I find the language-wrangling tedious and wonder if the arguments all turn on sleight-of-word. The sense I get is that it might be much ado about nothing.

 

The idea of Nothing, however, is interesting. I don’t really know what nothing is. No thing, I suppose. The chemist in me thinks of atoms and the void. Without the void, you can’t differentiate things. But is the void nothing? I’m not sure. Quantum vacuum isn’t quite the colloquial use of the word nothing; the vacuum has structure. Mathematically, the empty set is still a set. I’m not sure I can imagine nothing. The closest experience I might have had was under general anaesthesia. I remember nothing.

 

I’ve heard of, or read bits and pieces from, most of the folks that Holt brings up. So I wasn’t surprised by what I read, with one exception. I had not heard of the philosopher Adolf Grunbaum, who thinks that there’s nothing surprising about existence – of our world and more. Grunbaum thinks the question of why there is something rather than nothing meaningless at best, and worse – it sucks up time and energy that could be spent pondering something more worthwhile.

 

Essentially Grunbaum thinks that just because nothingness seems simple conceptually, doesn’t mean it should be given special priority. Nor should it be assigned any significant probability. He argues that simple ideas aren’t necessarily truer than more complicated ones, and uses the example of Thales (who thought water was the fundamental element) versus Mendeleev (who brought some order to the many elements that make up the periodic table). As a chemist, I can say with some authority that the elements are idiosyncratic when you take a closer look. Yes, you can talk about broad trends and the beauty of the periodic table as an organizing principle. But when you zoom in, the elements are an unruly bunch of chameleons, adapting to different environments in different ways. That’s one of the fascinating things about chemistry. The more I learn, the more idiosyncracy I discover.

 

I’ve also been influenced by reading Robert Rosen who makes the argument that the seemingly special simple things that we scientists like to use as our models don’t match complex reality. The models are impoverished mathematically and insufficiently generic. We prioritize the simple, because that’s what we can grasp, but complexity lurks in all the side effects that materialize because our models are too simple. Since I’m partial to this idea, I’m sympathetic to Grunbaum’s argument that the question of existence might simply be much ado about nothing. The practical-bent chemist in me is more interested in what I can do with these atoms of existing matter, and it’s hard for me to see the value in caring about the concept of nothingness. So, while Holt’s book apparently garnered a top-ten in the New York Times book review, I think it might be much ado about nothing.

 

P.S. Ed Yong’s book, which made the 2022 top ten, is however well worth reading!