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What is nothing? Kuhn’s nine levels of nothing
I would probably have been about 8 years old when a question popped into my head that would cause me sleepless nights for a long time. A question so perplexing that I didn’t even know how to phrase it. Why does anything exist? Why is there anything at all?
I wasn’t imagining an empty universe. I was thinking of no universe at all, and absolutely nothing else either. And that was a mind-boggling idea.
Of course, now I know that this is a common question, and it is often phrased as “Why is there something rather than nothing”.
This article isn’t about that question, but instead, it is about a more fundamental question — what exactly is nothing? This is a question Robert Lawrence Kuhn (who runs the excellent Closer to truth YouTube channel) attempted to answer by defining nine levels of nothingness. Sabine Hossenfelder covered these in another video. Below is my take on the nine levels.
Many will disagree with either the levels themselves, or their ordering, but I still find it is quite an interesting topic, I hope you do too.
Level 1 — an empty room
If you walk into a room with no furniture, carpets, curtains, or any other visible objects, you might say that the room has “nothing” in it.
This is the most basic idea of nothing. The room itself exists, and everything outside it, and of course, the room is full of air. But the room contains nothing you can see. It could be thought of as a childish or pre-science view of nothing, but also an everyday description that most of us would use.
Level 2 — remove the air
Of course, a room full of air is not empty, so we would need to pump all the air out of the room to make it truly empty. This would create a vacuum, at least according to classical physics.
This would leave us with a room that a 19th-century physicist might say was empty of all matter.
Level 3 — remove all other matter
So far we have removed all the molecules from the room. All the visible objects, and the various gas molecules that form the air.
