I was placing Trader Joe’s brand dumplings in a pan so I could fry them when the radio informed me that there are points in space with only two to three atoms per cubic meter. I counted the dumplings in the pan, six, and estimated the pan to have about 1500 cubic centimeters. I tried picturing the pan with only two to three dumplings and then blew it up to a cubic meter. I immediately felt hungry; I considered placing a seventh dumpling in the pan, then I tried to imagine the nothing between the dumplings. You can't see anything, and I told myself that the image, seven fried dumplings floating idle, was as good as it got. I tried to convince myself that, minus my lunch, I was witnessing the absence of anything, but I didn’t buy it.
I know, because I didn’t sleep through at least 45% of my high school chemistry classes, that there is a great deal of nothing. There is nothing in the air, in the water, in the pan, I was using, and the table I would eat off of. But I know this in a largely abstract sense; if you asked me what nothing was I would have trouble coming up with a serious answer. In a search for nothing, I could start with the idea of zero, but I understand zero primarily as either a financial or spatial concept. Positive numbers denote either a surplus or a position to the right of zero on the number line. Negative numbers denote debt or a position to the left of the number line. Zero is breaking even or a specific point on the number line that conveniently designates a movement between positive or negative. None of these representations seemed sufficient. As far as I know, the universe does not trade matter so a position of either debt or surplus is impossible, and if any point in space were at zero, then any other would not be regardless of whether or not there was anything there.
As I removed the dumplings from the pan I transitioned from the idea of zero to the null set. The null set felt more descriptive than zero; after all, it represents a set with nothing in it. I have developed a habit of understanding mathematical ideas, which I deal in less, through the lens of computer science which I deal with almost daily. In the context of a computer, a null set would be represented as some kind of data structure with nothing in it. But the construction is itself a thing; to denote it memory would have to be manipulated to create the structure and to do that your computer would perform computations. What is more, that ‘nothing’ would have to be marked? Instead of nothing, a structure with nothing between its walls or an object with holes, there would be a memory space with a special code to represent the absence. Computers resist abstraction; everything must be concrete.
But in this, the universe and my laptop agree. When I clumsily try to imagine the fusion within the sun, the movement of atoms and the creation of steadily heavier elements, the universe laughs at me. No matter how much I read, my abstracted representation will always pale in comparison to the reality. I will never be able to imagine every complexity of every action. An abstraction is a tool that turns complex reality into something I can fit within the limits of my mind. The problem with nothing is that abstraction turns complex ideas into simpler ones, not the other way around.
Abstracting nothing into a placeholder, an absence, or a mind without thought is flawed because all those ideas are more complicated than the original. Nothing is a tautology and it proves itself through the lack of any existence. To disprove it, all one must do is either divine a grain of sand in the specified space or move to inhabit it themselves. God declares his presence by announcing, “I am,” while nothing denotes itself through silence but is no less elusive. Looking for it would require action, and action would inevitably create something in that empty space. Even if we could measure without action or medium and so ensure the continuation of non-existence in an area, the scientist who discovered nothing between the stars or in Montana would be forced to prove that their method of measurement was sure to capture everything. That scientist might confidently state that their method was the most advanced in the world, but that would only be true until someone else invented something more advanced and discovered people in Montana and a new form of matter between galaxies. I can look down at my plate, now empty of dumplings, and declare that there is nothing there, but even if I ignored the soy sauce and the drop of oil at the edge, I could not prove it. But still, if all the dumplings are gone, what really is left behind?
