"Something" vs. "Nothing"
24 Jul '20 21:41I've been thinking. Always perilous.
Commence with the logic of noise-cancelling headphones: an unwanted ambient sound of a certain frequency, such as the drone of a jet engine, can be cancelled out by emitting in equal measure a new sound of the same frequency yet 180 degrees out of phase with the unwanted sound. Each crest of the unwanted sound wave overlaps a trough of the new sound wave, resulting in a cancellation of the two. Similarly the troughs of the unwanted sound are cancelled by the crests of the new sound. Both sounds must have the same amplitude as well as frequency (or wavelength) for this to work. The result, in principle, is silence: no sound. To get sound back, one of the two original sounds must be taken away.
On a grander scale, what if all sounds possible sounded at once? Would there be an infernal din of immeasurable magnitude, or silence? Every sound has a counterpart that is phase-shifted by 180 degrees, and thus if all sounds sounded simultaneously, all sounds must meet its counterpart and cancel it. Never mind other physical considerations such as energy (heat in particular) and limitations of the conveying medium (air in this case). This is a Gedankenexperiment only. Bounds could, and perhaps should, be placed on the allowed amplitudes and frequencies of the sounds involved, just as the laws of physics place bounds on what events are possible. There should be silence. Nothing. To get something, at least one sound would need to be removed from the medium.
But even if silence is not the end result, we might expect a "wall of sound" in this experiment. It has been said that there can be no music without silence, since silence is what makes notes distinguishable from one another. A wall of sound arising from an emission of all possible sounds (within our chosen bounds) would have the same effect as a single ceaseless tone of a particular frequency: a complete lack of structure and contrast. If we were born to such an environment, and lived all our lives in it, would we not perceive such a wall of unceasing sound as silence? There is everything, and yet nothing. If this all sounds rather Zen, that's because it is.
"Something" versus "nothing" is found to be a false dichotomy when pursued by intellectual analysis all the way down the rabbit hole, if only because the rabbit hole is found to have no bottom. The one concept can only be defined in terms of the other, seemingly opposite, concept, with terms needing definition using other terms that in turn need definition. The concepts of something and nothing are distinct from each other, and have meaning, only on mundane, shallow planes of existence and thought. Don't look too deeply -- just go with it.
This notion can be extended to mass and energy, conceived either as particle or wave. The wave viewpoint of mass and energy brings us back to my consideration of sound waves, with little alteration of the parameters. So I'll focus on the particle aspect.
What if every cubic unit of space, no matter how small, was occupied by an identical particle of matter? A universe-wide continuum of matter would result, just as the real number line is a continuum. Just as individual points come to create a line, so too would having a particle at literally every coordinate in space create a continuum of "something." But this necessarily implies there are no gaps between particles, and without the empty spaces between particles, there can be no structure. Everything is the same everywhere, and any consciousness that could somehow be born into such a universe could not perceive such a continuum as being anything other than nothing.
Silence, or emptiness, or "nothing," is necessary in order to have "something." This is not to say nothing is something, which is another old idea. It is to say there cannot be substance without there being emptiness. A bowl has a use precisely because it holds an empty space within it.
These musings, however ancient, are the primary reason why I am unmoved by arguments that a god is necessary to explain why there is "something" rather than "nothing." Remove some particles from my aforementioned continuum of particles, and suddenly there is structure, and there are reference points to steer by, and the idea of distance -- and space itself! -- is reified. And then with space there can be time, for all time is, really, is a sequential ordering of events -- events which must necessarily happen somewhere in space. We have a universe. And we got this universe by removing something (some particles in this case), rather than adding something. No miracle breathed life into this universe, just a subtraction of some stuff that was already present in abundance.
Is this just semantic horseplay? I don't think so, as what we are considering here is not so much the true nature of reality, but rather our perception of it. All points in space being occupied by identical particles would be indistinguishable from nothing, at least to the senses of anything living within such a reality. Of course, no physical creature could live in such a reality, but just imagine one's "awareness" being immersed in this realm, still magically able to see, hear, and so on. We would perceive nothing, and if we knew of nothing else, it's unlikely we could even conceive of anything else.
Coming back to Earth, consider how easy is it for us to lapse into thinking of the space in the Grand Canyon as being purely empty? It's a natural thing to do, notwithstanding the air, dust, microbes, radiation, neutrinos, and other no-see-'ems brimming over in that canyon.
To ascribe miraculous attributes to there being "something" is to ascribe the same attributes to "nothing." They are two sides of the same, single coin. We are then just saying both "something" and "nothing" are miraculous, which is utterly devoid of significance because it destroys the very concept of significance itself.
What is there then? What is reality? Just change and contrast. Yin and yang...
Commence with the logic of noise-cancelling headphones: an unwanted ambient sound of a certain frequency, such as the drone of a jet engine, can be cancelled out by emitting in equal measure a new sound of the same frequency yet 180 degrees out of phase with the unwanted sound. Each crest of the unwanted sound wave overlaps a trough of the new sound wave, resulting in a cancellation of the two. Similarly the troughs of the unwanted sound are cancelled by the crests of the new sound. Both sounds must have the same amplitude as well as frequency (or wavelength) for this to work. The result, in principle, is silence: no sound. To get sound back, one of the two original sounds must be taken away.
On a grander scale, what if all sounds possible sounded at once? Would there be an infernal din of immeasurable magnitude, or silence? Every sound has a counterpart that is phase-shifted by 180 degrees, and thus if all sounds sounded simultaneously, all sounds must meet its counterpart and cancel it. Never mind other physical considerations such as energy (heat in particular) and limitations of the conveying medium (air in this case). This is a Gedankenexperiment only. Bounds could, and perhaps should, be placed on the allowed amplitudes and frequencies of the sounds involved, just as the laws of physics place bounds on what events are possible. There should be silence. Nothing. To get something, at least one sound would need to be removed from the medium.
But even if silence is not the end result, we might expect a "wall of sound" in this experiment. It has been said that there can be no music without silence, since silence is what makes notes distinguishable from one another. A wall of sound arising from an emission of all possible sounds (within our chosen bounds) would have the same effect as a single ceaseless tone of a particular frequency: a complete lack of structure and contrast. If we were born to such an environment, and lived all our lives in it, would we not perceive such a wall of unceasing sound as silence? There is everything, and yet nothing. If this all sounds rather Zen, that's because it is.
"Something" versus "nothing" is found to be a false dichotomy when pursued by intellectual analysis all the way down the rabbit hole, if only because the rabbit hole is found to have no bottom. The one concept can only be defined in terms of the other, seemingly opposite, concept, with terms needing definition using other terms that in turn need definition. The concepts of something and nothing are distinct from each other, and have meaning, only on mundane, shallow planes of existence and thought. Don't look too deeply -- just go with it.
This notion can be extended to mass and energy, conceived either as particle or wave. The wave viewpoint of mass and energy brings us back to my consideration of sound waves, with little alteration of the parameters. So I'll focus on the particle aspect.
What if every cubic unit of space, no matter how small, was occupied by an identical particle of matter? A universe-wide continuum of matter would result, just as the real number line is a continuum. Just as individual points come to create a line, so too would having a particle at literally every coordinate in space create a continuum of "something." But this necessarily implies there are no gaps between particles, and without the empty spaces between particles, there can be no structure. Everything is the same everywhere, and any consciousness that could somehow be born into such a universe could not perceive such a continuum as being anything other than nothing.
Silence, or emptiness, or "nothing," is necessary in order to have "something." This is not to say nothing is something, which is another old idea. It is to say there cannot be substance without there being emptiness. A bowl has a use precisely because it holds an empty space within it.
These musings, however ancient, are the primary reason why I am unmoved by arguments that a god is necessary to explain why there is "something" rather than "nothing." Remove some particles from my aforementioned continuum of particles, and suddenly there is structure, and there are reference points to steer by, and the idea of distance -- and space itself! -- is reified. And then with space there can be time, for all time is, really, is a sequential ordering of events -- events which must necessarily happen somewhere in space. We have a universe. And we got this universe by removing something (some particles in this case), rather than adding something. No miracle breathed life into this universe, just a subtraction of some stuff that was already present in abundance.
Is this just semantic horseplay? I don't think so, as what we are considering here is not so much the true nature of reality, but rather our perception of it. All points in space being occupied by identical particles would be indistinguishable from nothing, at least to the senses of anything living within such a reality. Of course, no physical creature could live in such a reality, but just imagine one's "awareness" being immersed in this realm, still magically able to see, hear, and so on. We would perceive nothing, and if we knew of nothing else, it's unlikely we could even conceive of anything else.
Coming back to Earth, consider how easy is it for us to lapse into thinking of the space in the Grand Canyon as being purely empty? It's a natural thing to do, notwithstanding the air, dust, microbes, radiation, neutrinos, and other no-see-'ems brimming over in that canyon.
To ascribe miraculous attributes to there being "something" is to ascribe the same attributes to "nothing." They are two sides of the same, single coin. We are then just saying both "something" and "nothing" are miraculous, which is utterly devoid of significance because it destroys the very concept of significance itself.
What is there then? What is reality? Just change and contrast. Yin and yang...
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