Nothing is Real

Nothing is real. Perhaps it’s the only real thing. Except it’s no-thing.

 

Mindbending Zen koan? Or just physics? To really understand nothing, Amanda Gefter interviews the most famous theoretical physicists alive. The tale of her quest is told in Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn, probably the best physics-related book for a popular audience I’ve ever read. That’s saying something. Or maybe that’s really nothing. At the end of her narrative, Gefter concludes: “We had found the universe’s secret: physics isn’t the machinery behind the workings of the world; physics is the machinery behind the illusion that there is a world.”

 

Gefter goes on a decade-long quest with many twists and turns. She begins early on by posing as a journalist to gatecrash a science conference to meet John Archibald Wheeler, and ask him about the secrets of the universe. Wheeler is cryptic, speaking in riddles or Zen koans. But that makes Gefter and her co-conspirator even more hungry to know what physics says about the nature of reality. And this drives Gefter further into her “fake it to make it” charade as a journalist writing about physics. Her co-conspirator? Her non-physicist father who loves reading and thinking about physics for fun. Her book is a wonderful autobiography of their joint quest to unlock the secrets of the universe.

 

Why is there something rather than nothing? That was the question Jim Holt asked in his book (which I read just before reading Gefter’s). Where Holt focuses on philosophy, which didn’t seem to get anywhere in my opinion, Gefter focuses on physics and shares some profound things to her non-physicist readers. It’s all about nothing! That’s where everything comes from. She begins with the premise that if something is invariant, then it is real – it is something, not nothing. She makes a list of things you and I would think are invariant. And as she talks to physicist after physicist, the list gets whittled down. Until you’re left with nothing.

 

The iron-cladness of conservation laws start to melt in the withering attack of relativity. Not just Einstein’s special relativity. Not just Einstein’s general relativity. Rather all seems relative. All is observer-dependent. There’s no god’s-eye view, and trying to take one leads to all the spookiness of physics. Gefter discusses light cones, boundaries, black-hole horizon complementarity, holographic spacetime, Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics, Witten’s M-Theory, Maldacena’s anti-deSitter space, quantum loop gravity, and the strangeness of what we think of as constants: cosmological, Planck, or c. It makes my head spin. It throws me for a loop. Except that I might be creating all of my reality in a loop by being its observer and by thinking about it.

 

Nothing is invariant. Nothing is symmetric. But introduce a boundary or an asymmetry into the system, and voila, information appears. And that’s something. It from Bit. Wheeler’s hypothesis. In the Bible book of Genesis, God creates by introducing boundaries. Separation ensues. Light and Dark. Heavens and Earth. Sea and Land. Life and non-life? The origin of life (my area of research) must have come from asymmetry. But what is that fundamental asymmetry? The right hand no longer knows what the left hand is doing? It has its own frame of reference. Or maybe we’re imposing Boolean logic because it’s easier for us to think in those terms instead of wrestling with the strangeness of quantum mechanics.

 

I admire Gefter’s dogged persistence in pursuing her question about nothing. And the tale she weaves is really something. Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn is superb and I highly recommend it.