The World Science Festival! - Nothing: The Subtle Science of Emptiness

The 2nd annual World Science Festival was this weekend, and quite frankly, it was amazing.  On Thursday, I got to sit in on the lecture about Nothing: The Subtle Science of Emptiness.

And what does the moderator lead with?  John Cage's 4:33 of Silence.  It was brilliant and freaked a few people out.  What I didn't know - and thought was really cool - was that 4 minutes and 33 seconds is actually 273 seconds.  At -273 degrees Celsius, all molecular motion stops.  Ahh John Cage.  Crazy, but rather brilliant.

The moderator, John Hockenberry, then led with "Much Ado About Nothing", which made my little heart pitter-patter.  He started discussing the concept of "creation out of nothing" and how this underlying concept is extremely hard to grasp.  The concept of zero took much longer to dream up than the concept of 1.  One can be seen.  Zero takes imagination.

The lecture took a swift turn into science-mode, and I'll be honest, I couldn't follow all of it.  And I definitely couldn't write it all down.  But the participants did speak about two concepts that really hit me.  

John Hockenberry brought up the question of why there is something in the universe rather than nothing.  Why would something even be created?  And one of the panelists (I wish I could remember who) simply said, "Well, there are infinite ways to have something.  There is only one way to have nothing."  I love it when statistics can put everything into perspective.

The second striking point piggy-backed off this idea.  Frank Wilczek (hah!  I remember him!) explained that nothingness is inherently unstable.  Although I will butcher his explanation right now, just take a second to think about it.  The only place actual nothingness exists in our world is in a vacuum.  And how quickly does that vacuum disappear once the seal has been destroyed or something shifts?  Once entropy takes over?  We're talking milliseconds here.

But onto his fascinating explanation.  He said that nothingness is unstable, and while that sounds contradictory to the idea of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, it's not.   (Wikipedia's definition states that "the entropy of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium."  Meaning, things fall apart.)  So, while it sounds like we should all be moving toward a state of nothingness, in fact we're moving in the opposite direction.  

Yes, it takes energy to create something.  But you get more energy from the attraction of those things, than you do from nothingness.  Quarks and anti-quarks.  Matter and anti-matter.  The building blocks of our universe.  The energy of these attractions are what has created us and why we're still here to discuss it.  

As Prof. Wilczek was describing this (in much better detail), he kept bringing his hands together to illustrate his point and unconsciously drawing a slightly lopsided, heart-shaped circle.  And I was struck by how much this definition of science sounded like love.   

Interesting.