Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Romancing with nothing.

There are many theories regarding the origin and growth of universe. It is till today as much mystery as the origin and growth of man.

Mostly accepted theory regarding the origin of the universe is the "Big bang Theory". Though Arno penzias and Robert Wilson got the nobel prize for physics in 1978 for the discovery of the radiation from the big bang which by the time of reaching the earth had converted into microwaves, neither penzias nor Wilson altogether understood the significance of the waves they discovered until they read about it in the New york times. (Source:" lonely hearts of the cosmos" by dennis overbye).

There are and will be many controversies about the Big bang and the debates are likely to continue till the next big bang. One powerful argument which comes from Bill bryson and others is that Big bang is what they call "False vacuum" or "Scalar field". It means a quality or a virtue that introduced a measure of instability into the nothingness that was. Bill Bryson argues that its impossible to get something from nothing, he goes on to say that "But the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can have something from nothing".

This forms a very powerful school of thought in modern cosmology. Accepted that we have here something to see. But the axioms of science does not permit this argument. In science, the fundamental premise is that "nothing can come out of nothing". If nothing can come out of nothing how it is possible that something(universe) has come out of nothing. Linear mathematicians will quickly say that nothing is not equal to something so something can still come out nothing. In other words void cannot come out of void but something other than void can come out of void.

The fundamental virtue if i can call so here is "Nothing". This is a strange romance with an eternal virtue. People have been saying that at sometime somewhere something has come out of nothing. At the moment we have to agree because we have no choice.

Now let us look at it slightly differently. What is nothing? Oxford English dictionary defines "Nothing" as nought or "which is free from anything". So the definition is a simple linear function of human capacity to see. We know very well that Human eyesight like his intellect is too short sighted and heavily limited. Established laws of physics tell us that what we call red is everything but red. Only red is not absorbed in something which looks red. So if you are reading this blog and telling to yourself that this crackpot has written some crap in black bold letters, you have got it all correct but for the colour of the text which is everything but black. (In other words, any object which looks black is absorbing all colours but black. So in reality the object is not black. I may be opening another Pandora's box here with definition of colours).

The idea that i am trying to push here that, we know too little about 'nothing'. What we are saying nothing may be something that is beyond human understanding and perception. Even at a very basic level, nothing is a part of something. Space if we call nothing is also something (space).

So "Nothing" may be analogous to colour. There may be many many things in that "nothing" out of which "something"(universe) has come from. There may be enormous volumes of singularities and too much matter is nothing. But the fact remains that human intellect so far has not been able to decipher anything out of nothing.

1 comment:

  1. Just thinking nothing is out of nothingness...

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