Did you get around to reading Watt?
No, I haven’t. Why? Did he touch upon a “theory of nothing?”
No, tonight I read a fascinating article published on
Aeon –
From Nothing, Everything
One of the things the article got into was the development of the concept of the “void” by the ancient Greek atomists, Democritus chief among them. They called the void a “positive presence” - If the void is the absence of an atom, the atom exists as what fills a void.
Sort of like, does emptiness exist?
In the words of Democritus:
‘By convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour, but in reality atoms and void.’ (He also extended this “to be” and “not to be” paradox to differentiating between the pseudo-being of human experience and the true reality that lies beyond it.)
Aristotle, in his
Metaphysics, says that the atomists - ‘say that “what is” exists no more than “what is not” because the void exists no less than the body,’ that is, the atom.
In short, a theory of everything requires a theory of nothing.
For example, the atom has been shown to be “a profoundly indeterminate being: at once particle and wave, there and not there, something and nothing.” And, the Big Bang created all that exists in the universe theoretically from nothing.
The final paragraph of the article is quite eloquent:
Nothing is as paradoxically productive for physics as it has been for philosophy and art. It may even have produced the Universe itself, as Lawrence M Krauss hypothesises in A Universe from Nothing (2012), as quantum fluctuations of empty space spontaneously generated the virtual particles that gave rise to matter – as if Rauschenberg’s blank canvasses themselves created the shadows they reflect and the objects that cast them. Everything is born of nothing and, if the physicists are right, will some day be consumed by this expanding nothing. And that, we might say, is poetry as we need it.
Winner: 4th Contest August
Winner: June Flash Fiction
