Why Nothing Matters

We tend not to aspire to amount to nothing! To conceive of nothing as the absence the present, of time, space, my dinner, etc, is of course not new – all religions postulate an afterlife in this way. But to conceive of present nature as being nothing, amounting to nothing, is much harder for us to bear. We all want to probe the:

“frontiers where we are learning, and our desire for knowledge burns. They are in the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, at the origins of the cosmos, in the nature of time, in the phenomenon of black holes, and in the workings of our own thought processes.” (Carlo Rovelli)

So we start from us, here now, and we look back and speculate about origins. Somehow, it seems to help how we feel about ourselves. But our journey from our present state back to past is reasoning after the fact of our own evolution. Evolution itself has its own logic, but this logic is obscured from us. 

All scientists are a bit like a Neanderthal cave dweller, who (as Rovelli discusses) mapped antelope tracks in the snow. They understood the existential threats of starvation and predation. Antelope tracks are essentially negative, nothing – they are the absence of snow or earth. With the benefits of intelligence and observation of this “nothing”, our forebears could eat, fight predators, and we are here. Even Raquel Welch survived! Without this, none of them would have survived, and we wouldn’t be here.  

Today, we understand the existential threats to our survival as a species on this planet. Where are the antelope tracks we need to map and understand now so that we survive? Where is the imprint of nothing from which we can organize ourselves into effective collective action for survival? These imprints of nothing lie in our biology, our language, our institutions, our economies, and in the relation between our cells and their evolutionary development from the beginning of time. 

Where perhaps we might have once seen a distinction between the "scientific" Neanderthal analysing tracks and the "artistic" Neanderthal telling stories about the tracks, now our looking for tracks looks to see those tracks both in the scientific marks of cellular communication, and in the linguistic marks of our language as we make stories, music and other forms of human activity - all the imprints of nothing produce a bigger map, which we need to follow.  

When we go looking for the imprint of nothing, we see a pattern which connects our human world of language and culture, to a biological substrate of cells and communication, disease and health, to a quantum world where established theories of quantum mechanics allow for confirmation that this indeed is an “antelope”, whose journey across time we need build new kinds of maps for, and whose journey into the future can be determined by our collective intelligent action.

This is what me and a few colleagues from different universities across the world have been doing online for some weeks now. This last week, there was a powerful discussion which started about nothing and energy, and gradually evolved into a discussion about physiological monitoring, fitness trackers, etc. Is there something there? 

Is there nothing there? might be a better question.