A Description of Nothing

Even nothing is somehow something.

Image created by author.. Looks like nothing up there, doesn't it?

Nothing.

It seems like an empty space, like a vacuum, the concept of nothingness. Like stepping off a cliff onto… Nothing. (Except, of course, there would be gravity and a mass of earth speeding your way in that scenario, so not really nothing; but it’s that heart-dropping moment when your foot keeps moving where you expected there would be something that I’m more referring to.)

An old scientist said, in the book Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn by Amanda Gefter, that he thought the Universe, in the beginning of time, was nothing. But to get nothing, he said, you had to take everything in the Universe and break it down to its most basic component — the elements that make it up. Then you take those elements and break them down, atom by atom, till you have only single atoms of all the elements imaginable just floating around, not bonding together in any kind of way, not reacting in any kind of way.

Then break those apart still further until you have separated all the particles from one another, protons and electrons and quarks and neutrinos all getting along agreeably without a rogue proton and electron snapping together to form an atom of hydrogen. The particles would have to be put in just the exact right places to stay in such a state of high energy, existing perfectly…