NOTHING

'Nothing' is commonly understood as the lack or absence of anything at all. Colloquially, the term is often used to indicate the lack of anything relevant or significant, or to describe a particularly unimpressive thing, event, or object.

Contents

Language and logic

Philosophy

Science

See also

Further reading

References

Language and logic

Grammatically, the word "nothing" is a noun, which suggests that it refers to something. This can lead to confusion and forms the basis for a number of jokes. Its basic uses can often be restated to avoid this appearance: "There is nothing in the basement" can be restated as "There is not anything in the basement" or "Everything is not in the basement." "Nothing is missing" can be restated as "everything is present". Conversely, many fallacious conclusions follow from treating "nothing" as a noun.
Modern logic made it possible to articulate these points coherently as intended, and many philosophers hold that the word "nothing" does not function as a noun: there is not any object it refers to. There are still various opposing views, though: that, for example, our understanding of the world rests essentially on noticing absences and lacks as well as presences, and that "nothing" and related words serve to indicate these.

Philosophy

The concept of 'nothing' has been studied throughout history by philosophers and theologians; many have found that careful consideration of the notion can easily lead to the logical fallacy of reification. (If one does not believe that nothing is no thing.) However, many of the existentialist and postmodern philosophers and writers would argue that Nothing is actually the lack or absence of something, rather than of anything.
The understanding of 'nothing' varies widely between cultures, especially between Western and Eastern cultures and philosophical traditions. For instance, Shunyata (emptiness), unlike "nothingness," is considered a state of mind in some forms of Buddhism (see Nirvana, mu, and Bodhi). Achieving 'nothing' as a state of mind in this tradition allows someone to be totally 'focused' (in the Western sense of the word) on a thought or activity at a level of intensity they would not be able to achieve if they were 'consciously' thinking. The classic example of this is an archer drawing a bow, attempting to erase their mind as a way to better focus on the shot. Existentialism and Martin Heidegger have brought these two understandings closer together.

Science

In mathematics, ''nothing'' does not have a technical meaning. It could be said that a set contains "nothing" if and only if it is the empty set, in which case its cardinality (or size) is zero. In other words, the word "nothing" is an informal term for an empty set.
In physics, the word ''nothing'' is not used in any technical sense. A region of space is called a vacuum if it does not contain any matter. But it can contain physical fields. In fact, it is practically impossible to construct a region of space which contains no matter or fields, since gravity cannot be blocked and all objects at a non-zero temperature radiate electromagnetically. However, supposing such a region existed, it would still not be "nothing", since it has properties and a measurable existence as part of the quantum-mechanical vacuum.
In computing, "Nothing" (VB.Net), or "null" (Java, C#, others), can be a keyword used to represent an unassigned variable, or a pointer that does not point to any particular memory address, or a reference that does not refer to an extant object. Similarly, Null is used in SQL as a symbolic representation of the absence of data. This meta-data usage of "null" is different from the unprintable ASCII and unicode null character, which has a numerical value of zero — although it is different from the ASCII character for zero ("0"). The ASCII blank character (" ") is not the same as an empty string (""), which is itself sometimes confused with the null pointer in languages such as C. Most forms of assembly language have a no-operation (nop) instruction (often with a numerical value of zero) — that is, a command to do nothing, which can prove useful for blanking out areas of problem code.
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See also

★ 4′33″

★ Blank

★ Empty set

★ Existentialism

★ Negative theology

★ Nihilism

★ No

★ Nobody

★ NOP

★ Nowhere

★ Null

★ Null graph

★ Shunyata

★ Vacuous truth

★ Vacuum

★ Void

★ Zero

Further reading

★ ''The Book of Nothing'', John D Barrow

★ ''Being and Nothingness'', Jean-Paul Sartre

★ ''The Nothing That Is'', Robert Kaplan

★ ''In Search of a Cyclops'', Fredrick Schermer

★ ''Zero'', Charles Seife

★ ''The Hole in the Universe'' K. C. Kole

References