How Nothing Could Destroy the Universe
Copyright: Sanjay Basu Nothing has always been more dangerous than it sounds. For most of daily life, nothing is a complaint, not a concept. You open the fridge. You sigh. There is nothing to eat. This sort of nothing is negotiable. It depends on hunger, expectations, and how brave you feel about expired yogurt. Physics is not interested in that kind of emptiness. Physics worries about stricter kinds of nothing. There is the modest version, what philosophers might call nothing with a lowercase n. You start with something and remove it piece by piece. Matter goes. Air follows. Radiation fades. What remains is a vacuum. Sparse. Cold. Seemingly empty. But still something. Then there is Nothing, capital N. Absolute absence. No space. No time. No fields. No laws waiting quietly in the wings. Not emptiness, but non-being. It is hard to imagine because imagination itself requires a stage. If true Nothing exists, it cannot be part of the universe. It cannot interact with it. It cannot ev...