Much Ado About Nothingness - A Review of ​Void: The Strange Physics of Nothing
James Owen Weatherall, ​Void: The Strange Physics of Nothing​, Yale University
Press, 2016, pp. 196, $26.00 (Hdc) ISBN 978-0-300-20998-3
Reviewed by Lenhardt Stevens, University of Colorado Boulder
Nothingness​ is a philosophically interesting concept in a variety of fields. In philosophy
of religion, nothingness is the state out of which the universe was created, and in Buddhism,
nothingness is the essence that grounds everything's existence. Those interested in nothingness
have divergent literature to ground their research. Existentialists from Nietzsche to Sartre gave
us their versions of what they thought nothingness was, and it is up to the reader to inspect for
themselves which initial movements into the study of nothingness they believe jives with their
commitments to analysis. ​Void: the strange physics of nothing​, an offering from James
Weatherall, gives a scientific overview of some of the ways that nothingness has been dealt with
by the physics community.
Philosophers tend ask themselves how much physics do they need before they embark on
their conceptual analysis of physical concepts, and the physicists ask themselves how much
philosophy do they need before they name their physical concepts? For example, much of our
scientific language is inherited from language that was around prior to it receiving a scientific
usage. How do we decide which concepts are the ones that retain their term’s usage is a matter
of great importance if we aim not to speak past one another.
In much of the book, Weatherall acts as a historian for those of us who are unaware of
the developments physics underwent over the past five hundred years. He proceeds through
biographical information about Einstein when he unleashed the unintuitive ideas given in the
theory of relativity, plodding a charming course that is equal parts describing what the physicists
and their theories asserted and describing the physicists relationships with one another as
colleagues in an ever developing field. After we are shown Einstein’s relativity, he makes a
journey through developments in quantum physics, culminating in what is a rejection of ​empty
space ​between two particles from quantum field theory. Here is our first point of contrast
between a classical physics conception of space and a relativistic theory of space/time. In the
classical version space is a vacuum in which things are said to participate in existence, but the
vacuum does not occupy space itself; it is the background that makes the existence of particles
and other entities possible. On the other hand, relativity asserts (and subsequently quantum
field theory does as well) that space does not have pure emptiness, but instead is a field of
potentiality, in which there cannot ​really ​be said to be nothing. When comparing the vacuum
state postulated in quantum field theory, Weatherall reminds us that “in a classical theory; it
would be the blackness of a turned-off TV; in quantum field theory, it’s the state of no channel.”
(p. 115) I believe this highlights a disconnect between the possible realm of physical reality and
what that physical reality tells us about its own nature that I think is worthy of exploration.
Whatever a physical theory tells us about the universe may not have much of an
impact on how we are trying to understand our concepts of what is metaphysically
conceivable. After all, there is nothing logically incoherent about the speed of light
moving half an inch fast than ​1080 million kilometers per hour, despite it being a
violation of fundamental laws of the universe. If I tell you to imagine a rocket ship that
travels slightly faster than the speed of light, you should be able to; just think of a rocket
ship arriving marginally faster to its destination than if it were traveling at the speed of
light. Similarly, I claim that imagining nothingness, although not easily done, would be
achieved in a similar violation of whatever physical laws/theories are upheld at the time
of the consideration.
The book tracks the usages of the term “nothingness,” or “vacuum” or “void” over
the course of physics, but rarely does it seem like the philosophical import of the term is
being given enough of a spotlight. It cannot be the case that during the four hundred
intervening years between Newton and Leibniz's conception of empty space that
philosophy of science or physics fell equally silent about the question of what its
implications for nothingness were. ​It becomes clear that we don't have the philosophical text
I was looking for. It is much mores a whirl wind through physics (which is hardly anything to
blame on the author; who includes the tagline ​The Strange Physics of Nothingness ​in his title).
There will always be backlash from the philosophical community whenever a scientist is trying
to be a metaphysician, but thereto I would hope that the philosophical community would get
some attention in what turns out to be something that is by in large a story of empirical science.
Weatherall writes:
“...moving to quantum field theory seems to provide evidence for the second way of thinking
about the field. This will turn out to have real significance for what it means to say that there is
‘nothing’ in the region of space time. ​Nothing is not the ​absence ​of stuff; instead, it is just one
possible ​configuration ​of stuff.​”
(P. 65, my emphasis)
So here's the rub. If I talk about nothingness as being an a absence of something, any
new definition that tries to bring back something into nothing will be an illegal move on the
field. If nothing is there, there is no way to point something out, not even the nothingness.
These kinds of violations are of a kind we might say are prior to experience, and thusly should
not encounter blurring based on usage in the context of experience. A good point of analysis
comes with our understanding of black holes and their event horizons. Schwarzschild
space-time predicts the existence of black holes as “a purely geometrical phenomenon” (p. 75),
which is to say they are not things that take up space and might be a good indicator of nothing in
the physical universe. Additionally, Weatherall claims “[the]...same objects are not accelerating
at all: they are both moving along the straightest lines they can, in a space-time in which n
​ o ​lines
are truly straight.” (p. 71) And I think it is here where we get a good tension between our ​a
priori ​concepts and the concepts we gain from experience. If the black hole is carving out a slice
of physical reality and is engaging with entities within that reality, such as swallowing stars and
photons, it looks like ​something ​is doing the work rather than nothing. Moreover, where did my
concept of “straight” come from if it is not something I can find within physical reality? Might
nothingness just be the thing that we speak about to help us gain a simple understanding of
phenomena that do not actually embody it?
The question arises of if the universe has a structure without anything residing in it, can
it still be said to be empty? The structure is not one that manifests any object, and yet it acts as a
potential onto anything that may come into existence. This leads to a coherence problem that I
will spend a while trying to articulate. The tension between what scientific theories tell us about
what is physically possible and what we attempt to conceive of our concepts truly independently
of physical theories may be a kind of conceivability non-starter. After all, maybe even the most
naive of theories about the physical universe have suppositions surrounding empty space, an
intuition that, although not serving our scientific interests, nonetheless seems to betray
something about how we discuss space using folk physical terminology, items that are not
psychological in nature but grounding in ideas that are foundational for our experience of the
world. Someone should tell me why my black television screen of nothingness is wrong beyond
it not being a useful way to describe physical reality according to the quantum realm. Quantum
field theory asserts that, “...’something’ and ‘nothing’ are not even mutually exclusive: it is
entirely consistent for there to ​be ​nothing and nonetheless for stuff to show up when we try to
detect it.” (p. 127) These comments strike me a inconsistent claims, and driving this
inconsistency is someone who has not committed to there being a usage of a term that is
reserved for understanding how the universe is before it reveals itself to us.
Lay people, philosophers, and scientists have a couple of options when trying to
understand their concepts behind a given pair of terminology. The ​naive ​(I am reluctant to term
for its negative connotations) view says that if there’s something where there is supposed to be
nothing there is not nothing but something.1 When something and nothing are contrasted, I
think one could take these three tacks:
1) Their Opposition is Total ​If the opposition between these two concepts is total, then my concept of nothingness, although
perhaps requiring my notion of somethingness, is not spoken of in terms or concepts reserved
for somethingness. That is, the things that make somethingness the concept that it is cannot be
applied to the concept of nothingness.
2) Their Opposition is Relation ​On this account, much like the Newtonian understanding, nothingness is ​relating i​ n some
important way to our concept of somethingness. For example, somethingness and nothingness
might be important for talking about space, in that they a mutually dependent for its
intelligibility.
3) Their Opposition is Uninformative ​Whatever the resistance is to redefining nothingness to the point of becoming scientific useful, it
is not worth holding onto the naive picture because it is not supported by empirical discoveries
or methods.
I have tried to suggest that the scientific community stepping on the opposition between
nothingness and something as being total is a rather uninteresting way to explore some of the
concepts in our physical repertoire that might have an ​a priori ​basis. That is, looking into the
1
​I promise I am not trying to be funny with grammar; I think if reread that sentence is perfectly clear.
world to find our best understanding of nothingness might be a categorical mistake in regards to
our trying to understand how certain concepts receive their content. These kinds of concept
definitions are of philosophical interest, and should have a book dedicated to their analysis.
This book is a good start, but dedicates far too much time to a science that does not bear on
much of the philosophical problem of trying to understand let alone define what kind of concept
nothingness is.