Move along

     We all have concepts of nothing. Nothing is one of those ideas that is so broad that when each of us thinks about what constitutes nothing, we’re right. Don’t let anybody tell you different. One of the ways that people, or more and more, corporations try to influence how we think about things, is by defining words. It’s not like these corporations are cartoon villains with evil CEOs rubbing their palms and ordering their minions to change the language so that it makes Corporation X look better than mom, apple pie, the flag; more loyal than our dogs, and always there for us when the chips are down.

But the sweep of the products and services that we use, or that we simply know about, is broader, more constant, and more constantly reinforced than any other knowledge we have. So when ideas or words catch on about business, they have better than the best cheerleaders backing them. They have the near-hypnotic power of constant, technologically savvy communication coming at us from every direction, and very little opposition. It makes everybody feel better if employees are laid off, reassigned or furloughed instead of fired. Even ‘losing your job’ puts the action on the employee rather than the employer.

Words get changed too by popular culture, by not being used anymore, or as substitutes for things other than what they used to mean. That’s a pretty long way around to say that if we think of nothing as a room that’s empty, or what we did this morning, or what’s right about the opposing political party, we’re correct.

     That doesn’t mean there can’t be other meanings. Like what came before the Big Bang. Now, you don’t have to believe in the Big Bang to know what the Big Bang is. It’s a theory generally agreed on after decades of rigorous study in the scientific community about how the universe started. There was nothing and then something happened.

This nothing wasn’t an empty room. It wasn’t a space to be filled. It was the absence of anything.

No air, no light, no dark, no smell – there wasn’t anything that words can accurately conceptualize. We could say there was totally nothing, but that’s kind of redundant. We can’t make a drawing of the lack of existence, or a recording, or a sculpture. There’s always going to be too much in our idea of nothing, because we’re used to having a world or universe to give nothing a context.

I probably shouldn’t go any further without mentioning God. Most people on Earth – and I’m guessing because I don’t know – believe in God. But just so we don’t get too sidetracked right now, if you’ll permit the discussion of God to wait until later, let’s hammer away at nothing.

No space, no void, no place for the chemical interactions to take place that led to the anomaly that caused the Big Bang. But these interactions occurred. It’s a job for numbers, not words, to explain how it happened.

I’m going to go off on a tangent now. Spend a little time around Cambridge, Massachusetts. I suppose it’s the same in Palo Alto and other places where there are thousands of brilliant people. You see an international mix of subcontinent Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Africans, Europeans, South and North Americans – students who may not speak a common verbal language. But they all have math. It’s like Latin during the Holy Roman Empire.

Winston Churchill, and probably a few other people, said, ‘History is written by the victors.’ Right now, the victors are scientists. And scientists determine whether an idea is correct or not by measurement, which involves numbers, our lingua franca (the language that people all over the world have in common), our victorious common tongue.

     So. We have the Big Bang. And we have nothing before it. And about 14 billion years later, here we are. There’s a lot to fill in between then and now. The unimaginable concept of a 14-billion year timeline becomes relatively concrete next to the idea of absolute nothing. It doesn’t mean either idea goes down easy, or more particularly, whether ‘nothing’ and the Big Bang, and billions of years have meaning in our lives.

And we haven’t even got into the idea of God, yet. In my imagining of God, a supreme being could create our memories, weave them together seamlessly, and change them constantly, so that we seem to have lives, when we are actually re-created each instant. I suppose there’s a scientific way to prove or disprove that, but that’s only if we accept the proposition that what we understand to be real, workable and correct is anything more than a constantly created illusion.

I don’t believe we are created anew each second. But in the face of either 14 billion years or a supreme being, we are puny. Or maybe not. Maybe we’re giants, or close to what we consider angels to be, or close to evolving beyond flesh into technological entities with comparatively unlimited understanding and power. But not nothing.

P.S. (From Wikipedia) Many philosophers criticize physical explanations of how the universe arose from nothing, claiming that they merely beg the question*.
* The conclusion is included in the premises of an argument.