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.
