Nothing Versus Nothing
by
Alex (Sándor) Domokos
An imaginary dialogue between Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Einstein in Paris in a café on the Champs Elysée.
Jean-Paul
Hallo, Albert, here I am at the corner table.
Albert
Hallo, Jean-Paul. I received your invitation yesterday. I am in a hurry. What would you like to talk about?
Jean-Paul
About nothing.
Albert
Nothing? Is this a joke? You called me to Paris for nothing?
Jean-Paul
Not nothing. About nothing! My English is poor. I must have your opinion about nothingness.
Albert
I don't know anything about nothingness. That's philosophy. But "nothing" is a mathematical concept.
Jean-Paul
A very confusing concept. The problem is, if nothing is really "nothing", there is nothing to talk about. If it is a subject of conversation, then it must have some substance. Therefore nothing is something.
Albert
You hit the nail on the head, Jean-Paul. We have the same problem. By general relativity we came to the Big Bang theory as the moment of existence.
Jean-Paul
That's the point when existence as such started. Out of it emerged my philosophy of existentialism. But as I was writing my book on Being and Nothingness it occurred to me that if existence exists by necessity, it has to have a juxtaposition in order to comprehend. Like light needs darkness to make things visible.
Albert
That's the philosophical approach. In physics we started to speculate about the pre-Big Bang state of the essence. It cannot be called Universe since it had not yet emerged. We called that state the state of "Singularity."
Jean-Paul
And what is behind the fancy word?
Albert
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. There is no time, there is no space, there is no change. It is absolute standstill beyond imagination. It's the state when existence did not exist. Existence is your terrain, mine is non-existence.
Jean-Paul
It is mind-boggling!
Albert
It is even more mind-boggling to answer the question, "How could change be induced into the state of singularity when there was nothing?" It is easy to philosophize over existence which we physicists established. But we have no such luck. I'll show you my dilemma.
Jean-Paul
I am listening.
Albert
Have you heard about my theoretical experiment with the light beam?
Jean-Paul
Your imaginary journey on the edge of the light beam?
Albert
Yes. Imagine if we could travel with the speed of light, where would we be?
Jean-Paul
In eternal present.
Albert
Present, yes; eternal, no. Since no light could overtake us, we could not experience any change of the future, and since we could not overtake the light ahead of us, we would not have any knowledge of the past. We would be in a constant present.
Jean-Paul
That's what I said.
Albert
No. You said eternal. What eternal is, is just as impossible to comprehend as the concept of nothing. In mathematics we invented "zero" as a dividing line between positive and negative values. But zero itself is nothing, no substance. It is like the Black Hole in space. It annihilates any concrete number which comes into contact with it.
Jean-Paul
Up to now, you have not said anything about nothing.
Albert
Because there is nothing to say. In space we deal with points without extension, in time with present without duration, in arithmetic with zero without magnitude. Those concepts are tools of the imagination to deal with the incomprehensible.
Jean-Paul
You are right. The grandeur of the Universe crushes me.
Albert
And the minuscule world of the subatomic particles is equally crushing. because infinity is infinite in both directions.
Jean-Paul
We agree then that there is no answer to the question of nothingness?
Albert
The answer is in the ability to question! Thank you, Jean-Paul, for the coffee, but I must go. I have a lecture at the Sorbonne about my general relativity theory. And believe me, nothing is more confusing than relativity!
Jean-Paul
Nothing?
Albert
Absolutely nothing
