Nothing....

[tigerlily11]

is there any such thing?
I was listening to QI the other night and they seemed to think there isn't any such thing as nothing.
I had thought this for sometime and had argued the toss with the boy for a while over it.
QI seems to confirm I was right.
He says a vacuum is nothing but that can't be the case as it is obviously something, it is a vacuum.
So what is the general thinking on this.
Thanks for your time.

[vulcan]

Think you're right tigerliy, my dictionarys definition of nothing is:
"something that is non-existant."
surely if it's something then it can't be non-existant

[tigerlily11]

Yea I did look it up but thats a weird explanation of nothing. I can't remember what my dictionary said.
It's a nutty thing to get into a conversation about.
It sort of goes round in circles.
My son doesn't grasp the concept of nothing and the thought that there is no such thing as nothing. All things are something.
It's even harder to answer the question of what is nothing?

[nohorn]

This brings to mind, when my son was about 10 y.o. he asked, mom do you ever think of "nothing." I was really puzzled as to what he meant. We had a discussion that kind of went in circles.

[factor-fiction]

Nothing is the absence of anything. But I can't envisage whereyou would ever find NOTHING.

[jake-the-peg]

There is no such thing as a vacuum.

A vacuum is a total absence of matter. However the old saying "Nature abhors a vacuum" turns out to be truer than we could imagine.

There are such things as virtual particles. These are particles and their anti-particles which are continually being created and distroying each other very rapidly. A vacuum is in effect a seething mass of particles being created and distroyed.

This is the foundation of the idea of Hawking radiation around black holes where the particle pairs cannot recombine due to the black hole. It is also the basis of the Casimir effect - so we know that this is the case because we can measure them through this effect.

There's some stuff in Wikipedia but it's a bit technical try here:
http://particleadventure.org/virtual.html

[vascop]

The first thing to do is to define what you mean by nothing, otherwise everybody is talking about their own definition of nothing and that's where the trouble starts.
if nothing means "the fridge is empty of food" then everybody can agree that this is a real situation that can occur.
If nothing is taken to mean "no human life exists", and if planet X has no human life on it then we can say: "There is nothing on planet X".
If we say a vacuum is nothing, then even though we can never create a vacuum we can still imagine a vacuum and so again when we say nothing it has a meaning.
Just because an idea cannot be realised does not mean that it has no meaning - we can imagine it.
If I say I'm going to meet and shake hands with every person who lives in England at this time, then it is probably not possible, but it's not unreasonable to think about it

[vascop]

Also - don't take everything you hear on QI as being correct!!!

[heathfield]

So when someone asks, ''What the heck was THAT?'' The answer, ''Aww! It weren't nothing'' is, strictly speaking, correct!

[Trishy]

Ah! now you have delved into double negatives! It weren't nothing - so it must have been something!