Nothing

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This article is about "nothing" in the abstract sense. For other uses, see Nothing (disambiguation).

“None” redirects here. For other uses, see None (disambiguation).

Nothing is the lack or absence of anything at all. Colloquially, the term is often used to indicate the lack of anything relevant or significant, or to describe a particularly unimpressive thing, event, or object.

1 Logic and Philosophy
2 Science
3 See also
4 Further reading

[edit] Logic and Philosophy

Grammatically, the word nothing is a noun, which suggests that it refers to some thing. This can lead to confusion (and is also the basis for a number of jokes). Its basic uses can often be restated to avoid this appearance: "There is nothing in the basement" can be restated as "There is not anything in the basement" or "Everything is not in the basement." "Nothing is missing" can be restated as "everything is present". Conversely, many bad conclusion follow from treating nothing as a noun. In one old joke, if nothing is worse than the devil, and nothing is greater than god, then the devil must be greater than god:

(Worse) God $\to$ nothing $\to$ Devil (Better)

Modern logic made it possible to articulate these points more finely, and many philosophers hold that the word "nothing" does not function as a noun: there is not any object it refers to. There are still various opposing views, thought: that, for example, our understanding of the world rests essentially on noticing absences and lacks as well as presences, and that nothing and related words serve to indicate these.

The concept of "nothing" has been studied throughout history by philosophers and theologians; many have found that careful consideration of the notion can easily lead to the logical fallacy of reification. (If one does not believe that nothing is no thing.) The understanding of "nothing" varies widely between cultures, especially between Western and Eastern cultures and philosophical traditions. For instance, emptiness, unlike "nothingness," is considered a state of mind in Buddhism (See Nirvana, Mu, Enlightenment). Existentialism and Heidegger have brought these two understandings closer together.

[edit] Science

In mathematics, nothing does not have a technical meaning. It could be said that a set contains "nothing" if and only if it is the empty set, in which case its cardinality (or size) is zero. In other words, the word "nothing" is an informal term for an empty set.

In physics, the word nothing is not used in any technical sense. A region of space is called a vacuum if it does not contain any matter. But it can contain physical fields. In fact, it is practically impossible to construct a region of space which contains no matter or fields, since gravity cannot be blocked and all objects at a non-zero temperature radiate electromagnetically. However, supposing such a region existed, it would still not be "nothing", since it has properties and a measurable existence as part of the quantum-mechanical vacuum.

In computing, the null character and the zero character are distinct; as are the blank character and the empty string; the null character and the SQL null value; and so on.