20 Things You Didn't Know About...

Nothing
There's more there than you think.
by LeeAundra Temescu

1 There is vastly more nothing than something. Roughly 74 percent of the universe
is �nothing,� or what physicists call dark energy; 22 percent is dark matter,
particles we cannot see. Only 4 percent is baryonic matter, the stuff we call
something.

2 And even something is mostly nothing. Atoms overwhelmingly consist of empty

space. Matter�s solidity is an illusion caused by the electric fields created by
subatomic particles.

3 There is more and more nothing every second. In 1998 astronomers measuring the
expansion of the universe determined that dark energy is pushing apart the
universe at an ever-accelerating speed. The discovery of nothing�and its ability
to influence the fate of the cosmos�is considered the most important astronomical
finding of the past decade.

4 But even nothing has a weight. The energy in dark matter is equivalent to a
tiny mass; there is about one pound of dark energy in a cube of empty space
250,000 miles on each side.

5 In space, no one can hear you scream: Sound, a mechanical wave, cannot travel
through a vacuum. Without matter to vibrate through, there is only silence.

6 So what if Kramer falls in a forest? Luckily, electromagnetic waves, including

light and radio waves, need no medium to travel through, letting TV stations
broadcast endless reruns of Seinfeld, the show about nothing.

7 Light can travel through a vacuum, but there is nothing to refract it. Alas for
extraterrestrial romantics, stars do not twinkle in outer space.

8 Black holes are not holes or voids; they are the exact opposite of nothing,
being the densest concentration of mass known in the universe.

9 �Zero� was first seen in cuneiform tablets written around 300 B.C. by
Babylonians who used it as a placeholder (to distinguish 36 from 306 or 360, for
example). The concept of zero in its mathematical sense was developed in India in
the fifth century.

10 Any number divided by zero is . . . nothing, not even zero. The equation is
mathematically impossible.

11 It is said that Abd�lhamid II, sultan of the Ottoman Empire in the early
1900s, had censors expunge references to H2O from chemistry books because he was
sure it stood for �Hamid the Second is nothing.�

12 Medieval art was mostly flat and two-dimensional until the 15th century, when
the Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi conceived of the vanishing point,
the place where parallel lines converge into nothingness. This allowed for the
development of perspective in art.

13 Aristotle once wrote, �Nature abhors a vacuum,� and so did he. His complete
rejection of vacuums and voids and his subsequent influence on centuries of
learning prevented the adoption of the concept of zero in the Western world until
around the 13th century, when Italian bankers found it to be extraordinarily
useful in financial transactions.

14 Vacuums do not suck things. They create spaces into which the surrounding
atmosphere pushes matter.

15 Creatio ex nihilo, the belief that the world was created out of nothing, is
one of the most common themes in ancient myths and religions.

16 Current theories suggest that the universe was created out of a state of
vacuum energy, that is, nothing.

17 But to a physicist there is no such thing as nothing. Empty space is instead

filled with pairs of particles and antiparticles, called virtual particles, that
quickly form and then, in accordance with the law of energy conservation,
annihilate each other in about 10-25 second.

18 So Aristotle was right all along.

19 These virtual particles popping in and out of existence create energy. In

fact, according to quantum mechanics, the energy contained in all the power plants
and nuclear weapons in the world doesn�t equal the theoretical energy contained in
the empty spaces between these words.

20 In other words, nothing could be the key to the theory of everything.