THE PHYSICS OF NOTHING

Nothingess is a philosophical term for the general state of nonexistence, a domain or dimension into which things pass when they cease to exist or out of which they may come to exist. Nothing is the absence of meaning, value, worth, relevance, standing or significance. Pondering nothing could be considered, at best, a form of meditation, and, at worst, a total waste of time. Absolute nothingness is a beyond completion of absolute absence of everything or non-everything. Absolute nothing has no semblance of logic. It also means nothing coming into existence, nothing existing, and nothing going out of existence. Stranger still, it's the absence of not only things, but the possibility of there being anything, as well as the absence of the necessity of there being anything. If you take everything away from part of the universe, what are you left with? You'd assume the answer is "nothing", but perhaps that's not quite right. You can take all the particles and anti-particles away, all the various types of radiation, all the curvature of space and ripples of gravitational waves away, and find yourself embedded in purely empty space, where there's nothing at all for you to interact with. Yet, is that really "nothing", or is there still something there. A common way to look at this state is to call it a quantum vacuum. It's the lowest energy state of empty space, and yet one of the puzzling things that quantum physics teaches us is that the zero-point energy, or the ground state of the universe, isn't actually a state of zero energy. And perhaps more importantly, is our perception and conception of nothingness merely an illusion, or is it the key to understanding some of the most important secrets about the universe. When we want to talk about nothing, our conceptions take us outside of space and before the universe began. Yet how can you talk about "outside" when there is no space. Can you talk about "before" anything if you don't have time. And yet, whatever "nothingness" truly is, it contains the entire universe. Many physicists claim that there's no way to understand anything, fundamentally, until we understand nothing. So we can say that our universe did indeed come from nothing, and its eventual end state may well transcend to nothing as well after an arbitrarily long amount of time. A few things are certain; we have not always existed, we will not always exist, we exist right now. Whatever nothingness truly is, we are all something right now. And whatever exists right now, it did, at some level, come from nothing, no matter how you define nothing. But as to just what the nature of the ultimate "nothingness" actually is, that still perhaps the secret we're all endlessly searching for.