The Nameless Void
The House of Forbidden Knowledge's Senior Professor of Nothing introduces a batch of new students to Nothing.
One of the most famous quotes from American writer David Foster Wallace was delivered during a 2005 commencement address to the graduates of Kenyon College:
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
Let’s take the side of the younger fish for a moment. Why do you need a special word for something so ubiquitous that you can’t possibly imagine its absence? You have plenty of words for the properties it has and transmits, like depth and vibrations and pressure and viscosity and temperature and oxygenation levels and salinity and currents and beautiful little surface ripples that shatter the moonlight and make it dance.
The only time you might need a word for water is when you swim really hard upward and break through the ripply membrane and gasp in the thrilling chill and the blinding glare and smack back down and look up to see the ripples you made and feel the tickling bubbles of mystery that you brought back down with you rolling over your scales on their way back to the surface, but you’d be forgiven if you just called the whole phenomenon “leaping,” because that’s all just part of the leaping experience.
English has similar problems with respect to air and the atmosphere. We say “it is windy” or “it is raining” or “it is sunny” but hardly ever dig out what the pronoun “it” is referring to. When we sigh and claim that it’s an understood reference to the weather, we’re not doing ourselves any favors. Weather isn’t the atmosphere. Weather is something the atmosphere does. A category of properties it has and actions it performs.
If we have a better grasp of air than young parabular fish have of water, it’s because we routinely do experiments as children with candles and overturned glasses and throttling one another. But when we ask why the sky is blue, we still get a cascade of horrendous nonsense when the simple answer is that 60 miles of air is blue just like a quarter-inch of beer bottle glass is brown or green much of the time. The exact mechanism is typically only of interest to chemists and materials scientists.
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When we talk about “vacuum” and “free space”—which we think of as being as empty as things can get—we have to face up to the fact that supposedly empty space can have properties, like permittivity and permeability and polarization and vacuum energy and a speed limit and a foam of virtual particles out of which the more permanent kind can be teased.
In practical terms, the kind of emptiness people think about when we talk about these things is impossible to achieve. If you assume you can make a box of any size and keep all of the protons, neutrons, and electrons out of it, keeping out photons and charged force carriers might be a lot tougher, and then there’s neutrino flux which not even the mass of a whole planet can stop. Even if you could, though, there would still be something through which gravitational waves could propagate and quantum fields from which virtual particles could be summoned.
Are those virtual particles borrowed temporarily from the energy of that unstoppable rippling flow that’s always passing through? Could be. It’s hard to test without being able to keep that flow out—or even diminish that flow a measurable amount.
So at the moment the vacuums we know about are a typical “hard” vacuum, which contains no baryonic matter at all (like atoms or free nucleons), a QED vacuum which also contains no particles or fields with net electrical charges, and a QCD vacuum which contains no quarks or gluons with net color charges. And all of these are a bit hypothetical, being impractical to construct for testing.
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Let’s talk about that nothing in a different way.
Let’s put you on a little platform that can spin freely. You stand on it holding two buckets by their handles, half-full of water, maybe a gallon each so it’s not too much of a hardship. Then we start you spinning, of course, and as you spin faster and faster, you’ll notice the buckets being pulled upwards and outwards, away from your body, the surface of the water staying more or less parallel to the bottoms of the buckets.
Oh, I forgot to take away the Earth. Let’s do that now. So at this point there’s no downward force from gravity, so the buckets just go straight out to your sides. And the water stays inside the buckets, all the way at the bottoms, pretty much level. This is how it should look no matter where you are in deep space, right?
Cool. Now let’s take away the rest of the universe.
Are you even still rotating? How can you tell? The stars and galaxies aren’t spinning around your head.
Do you still have the angular momentum you had before we took the universe away or not? Unfortunately it’s not directly testable, so we’ve left the bounds of hard science. Even so, we still get to consider: is inertia and angular momentum inherent to our own matter somehow, or is it a function of the so-called vacuum in which that matter exists (as a kind of inertial-frame friction, perhaps), or does it somehow depend on a gravitic (or otherwise) attraction to, say, all of the rest of the effective mass of the universe all around us?
Regardless, if that angular momentum can be taken away, there’s a sense that some critical part of the ability to have inertia that is tied up in the everything else, that vast emptiness that could be the thousands of empty light years in every direction that, as long as the universe is still with us, causes the water to stay in the buckets as we spin.
Whatever else our empty space is full of, it is also full of that. And that’s not nothing.
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As much as we try to make science a rational structure with no elements of faith to prop it up, we can’t escape one possibly flawed assumption—that there’s nothing special about here that would make experimental outcomes different here than if they were performed elsewhere. But it’s another untestable assumption. The only place modern science can perform its experiments is in this place in the suburbs of a major galaxy, nine tenths of the way down an unremarkable star’s gravity well, shrouded by its massive twisting magnetic fields and buffeted by coronal winds.
I’m saying it’s a noisy neighborhood, which makes it really hard to isolate variables and determine constants. Also, how can we trust that any constants we measure are truly universal without taking a few confirming measurements closer to the galactic core and a few more quite a bit further out? It might make sense to think that the local “nothing” might be considerably more dense than the “nothing” you would find halfway between here and the Andromeda galaxy, or in the middle of the (only somewhat cooler) Cosmic Microwave Background Cold Spot.
Of course, the possibility that “nothing” can vary in density implies that there is a theoretical possibility of having an arbitrary volume with no “nothing” in it at all.
Regardless, we really need to stop calling it “nothing” and stop thinking of it as an actual nothing, and maybe finally recognize it as merely what’s left after we’ve subtracted all of the properties that it carries that we understand to one degree or another. Which means it’s just another (mostly) transparent medium like water or air. By analogy if not actuality.
The fact that it’s not the luminiferous aether that Michelson and Morley were hoping to find doesn’t mean that it doesn’t deserve a name.
Both “vacuum” and “void” are a bit misleading, but “primordial chaos” seems a bit dramatic—and also classically the Greek term “χάος” just means “void,” so that doesn’t actually get us anywhere. Some prefer discussing it as “spacetime,” but that also has drawbacks: 1) people tend to think of it then as some kind of inflexible Cartesian arena in which things can happen instead of a rubbery, distortable, tearable substance, and 2) time and distance are merely properties of whatever this substance is. It’s like calling air “temperature-pressure.”
There’s at least one vote for Tiamat, but that’s the name of our salt sea, and in direct contrast with Apsu, the freshwater sea—whose name also more accurately translates as “abyss” in modern usage. I feel it would cause too much confusion. Locke proposed the term hypokeimenon, which is a five-syllable mouthful that just means substrate, which is more of a description of what it is than a suitable name for it.
We also have a suggestion from one of the faculty that we call it Kyle, after one of the most legendarily empty-headed students that we’ve ever admitted to the University. I’m sure that suggestion was meant merely as an insult, because (to be pedantic) the substrate in question wouldn’t be Kyle himself, who would merely be a feature of the configuration and content of the substrate, but Kyle’s neurological matter. That kind of kills the joke, however. In fact, when the suggestion came up, I was the one who was pedantic, and therefore labeled, in an ancient language, Slayer of Jokes and Destroyer of Joy.
Also what remains of Kyle is very loyal and hardworking. Not that it has a choice.
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A huge secret regarding the cosmic substrate—or whatever it is that you want to call it—is that its inertial, reactive nature doesn’t just produce tiny virtual particles from tiny physical provocations, but also much more coherent macroscopic effects as long as the math balances. With a large enough (i.e., energetic enough) photon passing through any given space, you could conceivably watch a spontaneous cow/anti-cow pair production—though the odds of something like that happening spontaneously are immeasurably low. Perhaps it would be a lot more likely to put in a cow (instead of a massively energetic photon) and get out a very slightly different cow. Or to put in a moment and get out a very slightly different moment.
This happens all the time. It’s how we change the present into the past and a future—the future we want—into the present. Or perhaps that’s how it happens without any intervention from us. These things are hard to prove since we’re always present when we’re studying a phenomenon.
Like with the assumption about everything happening the same way everywhere, we assume that things happen the same way when we’re not observing. How would we ever know? When we look at the results of any one event, we’re looking at the cascade of the web of results from every event that led up to that event being observed.
We can prove mathematically that that causal web resolves differently for observers that are in substantially different inertial frames from ourselves. And we know that every observer is in a slightly different inertial frame from one another due to what I have no better term for than “a lifetime of microaccelerations,” giving us each our own personal histories. Here I’m not talking about individual opinions or interpretations or viewpoints from different angles of a universally objective history, but billions of parallel histories, all very very slightly different, but where, with time, most of those differences dissolve into irrelevancies and disappear, with the exception of a few situations with “extreme sensitivities to initial conditions,” which is the definition of mathematical chaos. But just as photons that travel long distances with each other lock into the same phase, these differences even out over time.
Unless we are twins and have moved in complete lockstep since we were born, we have different causal histories that may eventually result in us witnessing and recalling different outcomes from the same event. But since this is an inertial phenomenon, resulting from (seriously, ridiculously) tiny Lorentzian contractions in time and space due to the speed limit that Kyle the hypokeimenon the material substrate of spacetime puts on motion, this phenomenon of multiple parallel-yet-interacting worlds is also yet another supposedly universal phenomenon of our nameless void.
Here at the First University we have an entire course of study dedicated to the study of the nameless void. Consider yourself introduced.