Nothing

Though I’m not certain Aristotle actually ever directly said such, a paraphrase from his book on ‘Metaphysics’ of his idea of the definition of ‘nothing’ is that “nothing is what rocks dream about.” ‘Nothing’ is not a quantum vacuum from whence quantum fluctuations can spring. ‘Nothing’ is not empty space. If there is nothing, then there is not even space – there is nothing, because space itself is something. There is not a cosmic egg of infinitely dense packed matter if there is nothing – again, forgive the tautology, but there is nothing. But nothingness prior to the universe is simply too inconvenient for those that have grappled with the immensity of, well, everything. So now, instead of nothing, the new vogue trend in astrophysics is to postulate about infinite regresses of a multi-verse. Besides begging the question where this supposed multi-verse come from, this sort of speculation reveals ideological contortion some are willing to go through to avoid the thought that it was not an impersonal force that started the universe. Rather than have their cake and eat it too, they want to have their universe, and nothing too! Some eastern philosophies used to hypothesize that the earth was carried on the back of a giant turtle. When one such philosopher was questioned about what was under the turtle he responded, “it’s turtles all the way down.” We laugh at this, but shake our heads concurrently yes to the tune of ‘universes all the way down.’ For those willing to accept the mutli-verse, their wit may be as slow as the turtles, all the way down…nothing.