The definition of nothingness

When we look at an empty glass, we say there is nothing in it.

To be more specific, we can definitely say that there is very little to interest us. For a drunkard, "nothing" is classified as the absence of liquor in his glass. Similarly, for a treasure hunter, "nothing" is the two-year old British pennies he found in an Aztec site, which basically means he found no actual Aztec coins or relics at all.

But, for a physicist, nothingness has quite an abstract meaning, which shifts from being just a meaning to some extremely philosophical statements, which basically means, you can't define it.

Now, an experiment. 

Take a glass full of water, what do you see in it? Yes, obviously, water.

Now get rid of all the water by drinking it, what do you think is in there? Well, as the atmosphere is air, there is air in the glass.

And now, for getting rid of the air (please don't try this at home) take a vacuum pump and get the best possible laboratory vacuum that technology has allowed. What's in there now? Definitely no air right? That might be true, but there is something more inside it that quite honestly, you can't take out. It is space, energy and time.

Not the space that stars are in, but space, as in the fundamental definition of matter as matter is something that occupies space. And energy is in the form of electromagnetic waves. And time is, you are seeing light which takes a finite time to come from the glass to your eyes.

And when I say that you can't take out space, energy and time believe me, you can't. That's because the universe is made of space-time. Or more clearly, the universe is our only space, in our timeline. Now what does that mean?

In the time of the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang arose from nothing. As Bill Bryson puts it in his book "A Short History of Nearly Everything" that you couldn't have seen the Big Bang, as all the available space was created by the Bang itself. And when space began, the cosmic clock's countdown commenced.

Roger Penrose also claimed earlier this year that the universe had to be formed from an older one, because there is probably no chance that a spontaneous generation of huge energy was possible out of nothing.

Which reiterates the question, what exactly is nothing?

We cannot say "nothing" is something, because then it would actually mean that nothing exists, thus creating a beautiful paradox. If nothing is something, it means there can't be nothing, which contradicts the whole thing. 

A definition of absolute nothingness would go something like "a space where there is no space, time and energy". Wait a minute, how can it be a space where there is no space? It's nothingness, it's not meant to be defined. It's like an axiom, you can't prove it.

So, can we define it?

No, we can't.

That is surprising and expected at the same time, because not only is this a special case, but this is also like everything else in the world. There is no absolute definition for every single thing.

A definition can be in many ways, for an object or anything. Take a tire. A tire may be a rubber donut, or a circular object that goes onto an axle, or the thing that smoke comes from while drifting.

The noticeable thing is that there is always a reference to something in the definition, which is something that we sadly can't avoid. Because a definition always has to be relative to something else for it to be a definition. It is like a connection game, everything is connected to everything else. A glass to an Apollo hatch, or a comet to an ant.

The same way, nothingness is relative, because there is absolutely no way that nothing is something. So "nothing" is based on your perspective of it, and what exactly shouldn't be there. So the drunkard, how much ever drunk he was, could not find what he wanted in the glass, so couldn't Indiana Jones find his lovely Aztec coins (he almost always finds something, but anyway).

The point is that our definitions are not as absolute as we intended them to be, as we unknowingly or knowingly related them to other things. They are like the universe, never absolute and depend on others for their own definitions.

Pic from- fairytailfanon.wikia.com