Hi all! I have a free science newsletter that goes out once per week to which you can subscribe here sabinehossenfelder.com/newsletter/ If you have a topic for a video to suggest, the best way is to reply to the newsletter. I *do* read as many comments as I can. But, well, it's kind of hard to keep track.
I like your vids🤩. Plz keep hitting us with the ugly truth about our absurd universe. We want more about the void, the "free will" , the uncertainty principle, our inability to test the big bang theory and of course the impossibility of finding the truth cuz we might be living in a cyclical universe 🤕. Thanks Sabine
You forgot level 10. Sure, you got a level 9 in the box, but the box, you, me, the rest of the universe even is related to "what's in the box" or not in it. It has that relationship just by everything else existing around it. You have to get rid of all that to have true nothing in the box. But then, who would make the RUclips video??? By similar reasoning, your last question on screen, "why is there nothing rather than something?" has the similar issue. You can't ask the question if "nothing" was the current state. You could also ask, "Why does blue?" Similar thought processes. Or the deeper Drax philosophy hidden in GOTG, "Why is Gamora?!" lol
@@SolidSiren But something is always being called nothing. That's kind of the point of the video. All words are concepts that represent reality, all concepts are themselves something and the concept known as "nothing" is therefore something.
⛓️😉 Nothing is, nothing does? Not to offend, but, this 'alone' & 'jealous', 'always' & 'forever' business love costs us doesn't make sense to your other half. If not the edge of one thing or another, perhaps you not exist? Why do you think men are usually who ask women out? We need reminding. With the 'men having a higher infidelity rate' meaning 'women take more men off of women than vice versa' (& that it be women women should be afraid of & who'll set women free) & what with the relationship you really think is holy being that between you & what male friend of yours .. marriage only being holy by extension as our agreement to you to keep our mits off your friends ..(your now obviously married friends) I'm not sure why else you as men of our own for god knows what reason exist except for your math, which is obviously shoddy. It's like you want to grow on us, so our reality become yours like we're male & female angler fish. Like angler fish, we aren't monogamous btw. Never have been, never will. It's that you think we want to be yours no matter whether I can't borrow or ripping the label of our drinks, that we can't tell that every day waking up beside you we feel like we're looking down the barrel of a gun. At nothing.
"Virtual particle pairs are like couples you've never heard of that pop up in your newsfeed, destroy each other and disappear back into nothing, … except with maths" - This one killed me, thanks Sabine!
Everything (something) is dual to nothing. Being is dual to non-being becoming creates becoming -- Plato's cat. Thesis is dual to anti-thesis creates the converging thesis or synthesis (emergence) -- the time independent Hegelian dialectic or Hegel's cat. Alive is dual to not alive -- the Schrodinger's cat superposition. Particles are dual to anti-particles, spin up is dual to spin down -- the Dirac equation. Schrodinger's cat is based upon Hegel's or Fichte's cat and they stole it from Plato. Duality creates reality. The big bang is an infinite negative curvature singularity and Gaussian negative curvature is defined with two dual points -- Janus holes/points:- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_curvature Points are dual to lines -- the principle of duality in geometry -- non null homotopic. "Always two there are" -- Yoda. Synthesis or emergence is created by duality = Janus points.
@@fractalfelt But is it the line of little white lies . Or better known as " Saving someones Feelings " ? Sorta like a bonus round when gambling on the outcome of life .
this is the cutest thought experiment I've heard in a while, you literally just wanted to give your friend an absolute nothing box to make them happy for their birthday. It might break everything in the universe but atleast you gave your friend what they wanted :)
Well, they would still get the box though, which is something. But at least now we all know to better not give an "empty" box to someone who wants NOTHING 😂😂😂
@@mj7335 Exactly. See The Logical Leap by David Harriman. Science is basically induction from conceptualized perceptions of concretes, not deductions based on the arbitrary.
Thank You, Sabine, for treating varying philosophies and beliefs with respect, as you in fact continue helping all groups learn more, and even become more excited about science. :)
The paradox that keeps me up at night isn't the notion of nothing, but rather how Sabine can be so ordinary in her delivery, and yet produce such engaging content at the same time. (I promise this is a compliment, haha - great video!)
This is possibly one of the funniest science videos I have watched (and not a smile). Next video "The Infinities of Infinity". If you turn Infinity into a fraction (one over infinity) there is/are infinity fractions between each whole number. How say you?
I spent half of the video laughing. Both at the non-chalant delivery of humor, and the absolutely absurd directions I would never have imagined going myself. I mean that as compliment - she kept subverting my expectations all I could do was enjoy the ride. Brilliant combination of education and entertainment.
Hi Sabine, Thanks for Nothing! Loved your video which helps clarify how little most of us actually know about Nothing even though we may use the term frequently (and frequently inaccurately). I've been working on my own personal philosophy working from 'Nothing' and starting on up from there. So, imagine Nothing is ALL there is, no matter, mass, energy, observers, observations, interactions, just limitless, completely empty of everything Nothing. Nothing is the ONLY 'thing' the only one 'thing' (or is that none thing?) This would be indistinguishable from a uniform limitless 'thing' that is constant universally. Nothing then is nothing, one thing and everything, all at the same time. And if that were the true case then we don't exist and we are all just figments of Nothing's imagination - which it could not have as that destroys the concept of no observation or observations etc. Also if Nothing and One thing are indistinguishable from each other there could then be a minimum of two 'things' and we could in theory go on to have an infinite number of 'One Things' that are unlimited by time or distance and none of them would be able to interact with any of the others. But what if one thing was the exact opposite of Nothing and for some reason they were inextricably bound together... I wonder what the result might be?
Maybe God is the ultimate Nothing that's a barrier against things getting back to Nothing. Rather than creating, Nothing would simply sustain anything and avoid that being equated with it at all costs. I can conceive of a Nothing that fits this idea, which is where you can ask questions but Nothing could give an answer to the questions
Sabine is getting better and better- hilariously scientific and scientifically hilarious. Don’t you just love her! She’s fabulous. This video on nothing must be one of her best ones.
I feel the opposite. She used to display a little dry humor which I liked. Now she has joined the legion who build the presentations around a comedy routine. I doubt it is her doing. I find it distracting and annoying. Modern audiences are like little children I guess, you need to entertain them to get them to listen.
@@PraiseDog Science is seriously SERIOUS! Science is the art of Measuration. If it can't be measured, it's not SCIENTIFIC. How does one measure humour? As a teacher, I have often found that light humour can enlighten not just children, but also those of any age without understanding or even interest in a subject much easier than 2,000 pages. LIGHTen up.
As someone who has occasionally felt compelled to read a bit into ontology, this was one of the most interesting explorations of this subject I've encountered.
Like many others, I got to know Sabine with her book “Lost in Math”. Since then, she is a value in my life. This discussion about 9 levels of nothing reminds me of the opening sentence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s masterpiece Tractatus: “The world is everything that is the case”. I am a mortal bookworm with a computer science degree, not a philosopher. Here is my subjective interpretation of the sentence and connection to the discussion. By “the world”, Wittgenstein actually refers to the whole universe. I understand this sentence somewhat as: “Anything that we can say is limited to be about this universe”, in a more open form: “The expressive power of human language is specific and limited to express facts about this universe.” I think anything beyond Level 5 is beyond the expressive power of human language, whose origin is our universe full of things, and designed to talk about things. It does not mean that we cannot construct sentences about these concepts, but it means that the meaning conveyed by these sentences will have to be distorted just as an irregular piece of glass distorts the image behind. Even Level 5 is problematic. Look at the sentence “Sometimes virtual particles can become real” at 5:17. As you would think deeper and deeper on the definitions of “real”, “virtual”, “become”, “can” and “sometimes”, you may notice the distortion introduced by the lens of language. Almost certainly, we cannot construct a sentence about a place where “there are no laws of nature”, and expect it to be free of problems. I personally think a lot of language distortion is similarly the main cause of why we see the sub-atomic quantum world “weird”. In describing the double slit experiment, for instance, we often talk about the “poor” electron trying to “decide” which slit to pass through, and then with not enough time to decide, it goes through both at the same time. Clearly, the language and its constituent metaphors, evolved to express facts about universe at our human scale is introducing distortion. I am grateful to you Sabine for the thought provoking episode, you have a visible impact.
If you want to go further, modern language is simply a distortion of old language, with ancient words getting distorted into similar metaphors, which become dead and then simply describe abstract concepts or new objects. So when you speak about distortion introduced by the lense of language, you have to question way more than one would usually like to question and it is certainly not limited to concepts outside this universe. I'd also argue Wittgenstein is probably not referring to language distortion. We already have to distort our language quite a lot to explain and grasp things very much "being the case". And after a while we do not recognize a former distortion as a distortion anymore.
You raised some thought provoking ideas thank you! I see it in a similar way it I don’t think language is the limiting factor but instead intelligence. Much like animals could never understand the universe in the way humans can we are incapable of understanding concepts that are beyond our universe. Even if we found a way to increase our intelligence or ascend to a higher level of understanding or awareness, intelligence itself is still a concept from within our universe
“The world” is all of reality, not just our universe. As far as I know at least, I’ve heard it used in a couple philosophical arguments and defined as such.
Everything (something) is dual to nothing. Being is dual to non-being becoming creates becoming -- Plato's cat. Thesis is dual to anti-thesis creates the converging thesis or synthesis (emergence) -- the time independent Hegelian dialectic or Hegel's cat. Alive is dual to not alive -- the Schrodinger's cat superposition. Particles are dual to anti-particles, spin up is dual to spin down -- the Dirac equation. Schrodinger's cat is based upon Hegel's or Fichte's cat and they stole it from Plato. Duality creates reality. The big bang is an infinite negative curvature singularity and Gaussian negative curvature is defined with two dual points -- Janus holes/points:- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_curvature Points are dual to lines -- the principle of duality in geometry -- non null homotopic. "Always two there are" -- Yoda. Synthesis or emergence is created by duality = Janus points.
@@jayrathjen1127 Concepts are dual to percepts -- the mind duality of Immanuel Kant. Relax dude I am hitting you with the 4th law of thermodynamics! "Entropy is a measure of randomness" -- Roger Penrose. Syntropy is a measure of order. Randomness (entropy, uncertainty) is dual to order (syntropy, certainty). Certainty is dual to uncertainty -- the Heisenberg certainty/uncertainty principle. From a converging, convex (lens) or syntropic perspective everything looks divergent, concave or entropic -- the 2nd law of thermodynamics. All observers have a syntropic perspective according to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. My syntropy is your entropy and your syntropy is my entropy -- duality! Syntropy (prediction) is dual to increasing entropy -- the 4th law of thermodynamics! Teleological physics (syntropy) is dual to non-teleological physics (entropy). Mind (the internal soul, syntropy) is dual to matter (the external soul, entropy) -- Descartes or Plato's divided line. There are patterns of duality hardwired into physics, mathematics & philosophy. Schrodinger's cat is based upon Hegelian philosophy or metaphysics but the books do not tell you that. Bosons (symmetric wave functions, waves) are dual to Fermions (anti-symmetric wave functions, particles) -- wave/particle or quantum duality. Bosons are dual to Fermions -- atomic duality. You and your mind are built form atoms hence duality. Energy is duality, duality is energy. Energy is dual to mass -- Einstein. Dark matter is dual to dark energy. That is the good news. Good news is dual to bad news. The bad news is that main stream physics is currently dominated by materialists or teleophobia. Teleophilia is dual to teleophobia. Signals (patterns, order, predictability, syntropy) are dual to noise (randomness, unpredictability, entropy). "The brain is a prediction machine" -- Karl Friston, neuroscientist. Making predictions to track, targets, goals and objectives is a syntropic process -- teleological. There is a dual process to that of increasing entropy namely syntropy. Syntropic processes are dual to entropic processes.
@@hyperduality2838 And orange isn't dual to red, so please stuff it. Your useless duality is useless, which is dual to useful in all it's degrees of usefulness, which you lack.
Steve Pinker's favorite joke goes as follows. The student asks the teacher "Why is there something rather than nothing?" The teacher responds, "Ah, even if there wasn't you still wouldn't be satisfied."
Love your channel, your content and the honest delivery spiced with dry humour Sabine. I remember a period in the '80s when physics and eastern philosophy/religion started dating. (I think) Fritjof Capra started it with 'The Tao of Physics'. There were others as well such as Gary Zukav's "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" . Books such as these were generally entertaining/thoughtful without going too von Daniken in how they presented their material. This reminded me how much I enjoyed the intersection of physics and philosophy.
Everything (something) is dual to nothing. Being is dual to non-being becoming creates becoming -- Plato's cat. Thesis is dual to anti-thesis creates the converging thesis or synthesis (emergence) -- the time independent Hegelian dialectic or Hegel's cat. Alive is dual to not alive -- the Schrodinger's cat superposition. Particles are dual to anti-particles, spin up is dual to spin down -- the Dirac equation. Schrodinger's cat is based upon Hegel's or Fichte's cat and they stole it from Plato. Duality creates reality. The big bang is an infinite negative curvature singularity and Gaussian negative curvature is defined with two dual points -- Janus holes/points:- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_curvature Points are dual to lines -- the principle of duality in geometry -- non null homotopic. "Always two there are" -- Yoda. Synthesis or emergence is created by duality = Janus points.
There can only always already have been something, just because nothing cannot ever be. The only being that truly comes from nothing, is that being which is never what it is: namely yourself as pure subject.
Since there is something, we are here to ask "Why isn't there nothing". The anthropic principle doesn't answer the question why, or how, just that it is so that things exist including ourselves.
There is another level of Nothing missing from the list. Level 0 if you like. It's the absence of something expected to be there. For example a series of opaque jars that normally contain cookies. When asked what is in jar 1, you may answer Ten chocolate chip, Jar 2 contains five biscotti, Jar 3 may contains the crumbs from custard cremes but that can be described as 'Nothing'. In the present box in the video, if it contained bubble wrap and a piece of packing tape it would still be classed as empty or containing nothing because when compared to expectations, it contains nothing.
Love seeing Lost in Math on my shelf, and your videos in my feed. Your works are valuable, and as a physics student, I find your content inspiring! Keep up the amazing work.
@@AdrianBoyko If that's true, how can it be a box? Example: If you have a steel cube that you say is a box that doesn't have an "inside", then the material the box is made out of becomes the thing that is inside the box.
I heard someone say once "when has someone ever observed a nothing to know it's possible or how it works?". I'm now not convinced nothing was ever a thing, but I did use to buy into the concept.
I remember taking acid and on the come up remembering a conversation about the wetness of water with my brother in law. This led me to a completely different understanding about what nothing might be or not be.
I started thinking about nothing over 60 years ago, I'm happy to know it is something. Thank you Sabine for taking the time to go somewhere out of the box with your your take on this invisible, place holding subject...
"I really think people are way too respectful of all the stuff physicist make up and get away with, just because their maths is incomprehenseable" Hut ab für dieses ehrliche Geständnis einer Wissenschaftlerin
It really feels like physicists just become philosophers at that point, with all methodological problems of philosophy attached. But instead of using language, they are using math, which may make their findings even less useful ironically.
@JoniWan77 as an aspiring philosopher I would agree with you, but I would caveat that the ‘methodological problems’ in philosophy are intractable. Recommend looking into ‘the criterion problem’. Basically it notices that it is by an implicit philosophy of epistemology that we decide any methodology to be ‘good’. What you evaluate as a ‘problem’ in a methodology will be based on a particular set of axioms, but accounting for these axioms is it’s own identical evaluation problem, and there is simply no obvious way to close that hole in a worldview.
@@thomaskilroy3199 Problem may have been the wrong word. I am myself a student of literature. I simply believe it is important to be aware of one's methodology and how it impacts your findings. The methods of a humanities scholar for example lead to findings, which are very different in nature than those of a scientist. Especially scientists and to a degree economics scholars seem to not be aware of the differences most of the time, which makes their own dealings with similar methodology seem a tad naive and arrogant at the same time in my experience.
@JoniWan77 yes I agree, though it is not always arrogance, but different fields do often forget how to make each other’s methodologies talk to each other.
Thank you!! Inspiring!!! My thought game: a vacuum is a nothingness that still is something. A void is a nothingness that still is something. And then a nothingness that is beyond time and space. And further a nothing that is beyond - the beyond. Never existed and never will exist. Can't even cease because it never was or will be. Nothing that is nothing is not…🙏
Love this video, the concept of nothing haunted me when I was younger, very nice to have these different levels explained like this, and your sense of humor really made it fun too :) Thank you for all you do!
Nothing= not anything or non-existence. There you go a definition of nothing that is absolute. Someone once told me nothing is what sleeping rocks dream of, if you want to be poetic about it.
Finally a video about me. I love your time spent on the philosophical aspect of a lot of your topics. Theoretical science without philosophy is like cooking without the intent of eating.
I have watched a few of Sabine's videos and they all make me laugh, I like her sense of humour; at 8:34 this one cracked me up. I also agree that something cannot come from nothing and how can we trust scientists who come up with incomprehensible formulas. Thank you, Sabine, for presenting information in an understandable way.
@@Cheepchipsable Of course you can't trust scientists, unless they're also experts in every other field like epistemology, modal logic, philosophy etc etc. A "scientist" who doesn't understand the difference between Inductive methods of science, where large, randomized, controlled samples with experimentation that can be repeated at will; and the other things they ramble on about, pertaining to abductive reasoning, that can never be repeated, like infinite parallel universes, multiverse, conditions prior to expansion, the definition of "nothing", and so much more, they literally have no idea what they are saying (a vast majority of the time), needs to say a lot less on such subjects. They're trying to deduce such explanations into existence, just as apologists do for God, except that apologists rely on things like good metaphysics, modal and propositional logic, whereas a vast majority of "scientists" don't even know what they are (nor do they need to, if they'd stick to their jobs, instead of making silly annunciations pertaining to things like philosophy and religion).
That was brilliant. My head exploded half way though, but it was nothing. I'd suggest two extra levels of not nothingness. The social levels... Level 10 when asking your partner "what's the matter?" Level 11 When asking your partner "what are you thinking about?" And the Hitchhikers Guide to not nothingness.... 12 What's the meaning of life? (Clue: it's a universal constant)
You need to downgrade quite a few levels of nothing to acheive those nothings which are somethings they're nothings... Which are.. Somethings... Which... Are.... Nothings... Which then can't be nothings!? Goddamnit so nothing means nothing!
@@marko.rankovic If not something is nothing then is not nothing yesthing? Maybe we're asking the wrong thing and we should be asking if there is not yesthing. But then what about antiyesthing and antinothing? Is that even a thing?
Try meditating, it's the easiest way to imagine nothing :p And for infinity you can just start small and go from there. Instead of making infinity big, you keep dividing an arbitrary imagined number. Physically that will have a barrier, but in maths you can just have infinite numbers between 1 and 2 and between every two numbers you put there you can put another infinity of numbers that keep getting smaller and smaller and then you have an infinity within an infinity. Or here's a way to imagine both at the same time, an infinity and absolute nothing: Imagine what people do. You know, stuff like singing, walking, falling on their asses, baking a cake, saying hi or giving a compliment. Now compare that to what all gods have ever done: nothing. Now compare infinite gods doing what they do to you giving one person a smile to make them feel better: nothing from infinite gods and you did infinitely more than all gods combined ever did in the history of existence. See how easy that was?
It is not because of a limitation of your brain that you couldn't imagine those things. It is because you tried to imagine something which cannot exist.
Hello Sabine. This is by far one my favorite episodes. Thank you. I've had an idea rattling around my brain for a couple of decades now, that this episode seems to validate in some fashion. My thought experiment suggests that when you have nothing, you are left with nothing but possibility. I think you said as much also. Then I wondered if in the absence of time, presumably the condition prior to the big bang, if an "infinite amount of time" is actually indistinguishable from "instantaneousness." If we could agree on that, then given just the possibility of a particle popping into existence out of nothing would be a 100 percent surety since all other possibilities (like nothing happening at all for instance) will have been exhausted -- throughout an infinite eternity of nothing happening having played itself out. In my mind, the instant "nothingness" is achieved somehow, "somethingness" must instantaneously show up to fill the void. I'd love to hear some future thoughts that explore this further. ps. Love your videos. Alles gute, Uwe
Hello Uwe, Thank you for sharing your thought experiment and describing it so succinctly as wondering “if an infinite amount of time is indistinguishable from instantaneous.” I’ve likewise wondered about this for many years and keep feeling like it leads to interesting possibilities. Perhaps we could mull it over if there is a way to connect. All the best, William
NOTHING and EVERYTHING exist simultaneously, just as E = M. We can ask if the number 0 is a true nothing or is it the nothing that comprises everything (infinity) and thereby remains in equilibrium. 0 manifesting as all possibilities, including their opposites (matter, anti-matter) In such a scenario, the Many Worlds Interpretation seems more plausible, as the probability becomes 1/infinity, which mathematically is not meaningful, but appears to illustrate that every moment can branch out in innumerable ways, and the sum of all such moments/worlds lead to equilibrium. Time is also an illusion in this framework from the vantage point of the 0, because no change is happening, and everything happens simultaneously. Like if a 0 splits itself into a -1 and a +1, there is no change and therefore no passage of time. The various moments/facets of existence of anything/particle/life-form etc. are akin to different numbers that are already inside the zero and balanced by their opposite counterparts.
@@Eliphas_Leary, but, if it contains something, even possibilities of the set containing 🐈, both dead 💀, dead/alive, and alive, it loses levels of nothing?
You did a really good job of explaining it, you broke down every concept and made it easier for some to understand. "True nothing" is the absence of all concepts and possibilities, therefore "nothing" will never exist, and there will always be something, there is no conceivable possibilities that allow "nothing" to exist.
1) Is calculus the way we deal with getting as close to zero (nothing) as possible? 2) If you take away time (which is change) do not you also remove any potentials? 2) a Haiku : if there's nothing - it separates everything - if not, nothing does 3) is there the inverse of nothing (infinity)? 4) Why can we use zero in equations but not infinity (is one a real number and the other not)?
I love your videos and this one was very entertaining. I watched it some days ago and now it got me thinking about Nothing. For me, Nothing is just a concept - with different levels as you explained -. There is nothing like nothing outside our thoughts and concepts, so you can't give someone nothing by giving him something. If he wants nothing for his birthday, you just don't give him anything. If you do give him the box, there is still the box.
This is a a nice video, Sabine, interesting and light- hearted. As a mathematician, there are two other answers: the empty set (and von Neumann's beautiful idea of constructing all of the natural numbers - and thence all of mathematics- out of it using set theory), and zero probability (you can have events which are "impossible" in the sense of having probability zero, and yet can actually happen.) An example is choosing a point at random from the unit interval; the probability of choosing exactly that point beforehand is zero, hence impossible, and yet you did it! (So in this way mathematicians are doing the impossible every day!) A very different type of "nothing" is the nothing of zen Buddhism, which has maybe four aspects: it's actually quite fascinating from an intellectual point of view; it can only be talked about using paradoxical statements to point at what is meant; but it can only be really understood by "practice", which in its simplest-to-explain form comes out of doing zen meditation. The fourth aspect is that this is actually extremely practical as experiencing glimpses of this "nothingness" tends to be very healthy for our emotions, mind and body, essentially bringing one back to the state of "being yourself", acting very appropriately and naturally, without perhaps the usual stress and anger or fear we might often feel. Intellectually, this sort of "nothing" can be summarized by saying "no distinctions". Then "everything" is the same as "nothing" as everything is the same as everything else. This is one of those paradoxical statements I mentioned. This is different from set theory as "everything" would correspond to the Universe, the set of all sets, which by Russell's fascinating paradox is not itself a set. Sorry, that's just an aside! But once you grasp the intellectual idea of "everything is nothing", you can legitimately ask, "So what?". The point here is that understanding something is not the same thing as experiencing it deeply. Experiencing it deeply has itself many levels. (And yet of course doesn't have any levels at all!) But what I mean is that the first time you really feel this, it's pretty mind-blowing. It's an experience which is truly beyond words and is not even really an experience at all as it can't be labelled at all. This is a kind of mini-enlightenment or "opening". But, the next moment or the next day this is worth very little. (That and $3.50 will buy you a cup of espresso!) Really it only serves as a memory to remind you to try to sit down every morning on your black cushion for 20-40 minutes and try to just, well, just sit there, with relaxed breathing and good posture. Once you get kinda good at that, which may take decades (speaking from personal experience) it starts to become easier to get past the gates of annoyance and impatience and even physical or emotional pain and just be there. The consequence of all this is that afterwards, you may find yourself spontaneously doing something you had been putting off or might be kinder to a friend or a random stranger, or might suddenly have an unexpected spring in your step or twinkle in your eye. Or not! But that kind of nothing is, one might say, definitely worth Something! My favorite reference for Set Theory is Halmos' little book, and for zen is the Soto zen of Dogen, as explained by Suzuki Roshi in his lectures which can be found at cuke.com. Since zen can't really be explained directly in a useful way, many people try to point at it by way of a painting (like the famous Japanese or Chinese artworks) or by a poem. (But it can be just as well expressed in anything ...) Dogen was often poetic and said something like this: To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be awakened by all things. When awakened by all things, your body and mind drop away. When your body and mind drop away, No trace of this realization remains, And this no-trace continues forever...
Hmm, an atypical carnal experience(biblically speaking). This reminds me of a bible verse. 2 Timothy 3:7 always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.
An interesting analysis, I'll be true official. Your careful mathematical observations are appreciated; however, if the goal of Zen Meditation is a return of the Soul to Nothingness, then this is, in my best estimation, illogical. For there is no such thing as "Nothing".
Your Probability Zero is not 0%, it is a probability of 1/infinity - which approaches 0 but is still possible (infinitesimal). A true 0% probability is the chance of rolling a 100 on a 6 sided die with faces 1,2,3,4,5,6. You can divide by an infinitesimal, while you cannot divide by 0.
@@aaronbredon2948 Understood. I believe the Mandelbrot Set best demonstrates your point. In Mathematics, zero is the absence of value, but in reality, there can never be a total absence of anything. If time, space, matter, or even a Divine Spirit never existed, neither would we.
@@MrWildbill My dad absolutely thought Hogan's Heros was offensive. He was born in Germany in 1935, and his father - my Opa - was sent to die in the Eastern Front for the crime of meeting with others in a church basement. He thought a TV sit-com about living under Nazi rule was beyond belief, and it was forbidden in our house. Nazis were never anything to be taken lightly.
I've been binging your channel since I've discovered it a few days ago. I love how you give every idea a fair chance! I also have a subject request: would you be interested in covering the idea of "Elektrosmog"? Somebody I know claims to be very sensitive to it, and I am sceptical about the whole concept (not her symptoms, but the way she attributes them to electromagnetic pollution or whatever). But since I've watched your video on 5G, I think that maybe I shouldn't dismiss her idea off-hand.
@Bianca Arlette By following trades do you mean copying her trades,as its done in etoro? Are you giving her your money or the money stays on your account? I have heard about copying trades but have not looked into it but I have an idea of what it is.
@Bianca Arlette I'm glad you advised to look her name online to see her portfolio,this is very important, making your own research is very essential. Thank you so much.
@@zilla5749 Haha, yeah, it's amazing how these scammers are using bots and their fake conversations on Sabine's video, as if they want to prove A.I. has passed the Turing test...but of course they fail BIGLY
Very enlightening. Thank you for "nothing". 😁 I am a regular viewer of your channel, and it's getting better and better (just like expanding universe). Thank you.
Nice recap of Nothing! I very much liked Krauss' books "Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science" and The Physics of Star Trek, but felt that "A Universe from Nothing" cheated the reader as the level of Nothing he chose to start with wasn't empty enough. So I'm glad you mentioned that. I enjoy your discourse.
Accurate af, with absurdly entertaining jokes! Semantics about this is everything we wanted to hear from Sabine at some point and it happened. Other physicists and people need to see this video to maybe help them realize....something about the what we really mean when we say "nothing" and the fact that it depends on the context. So, "nothing" doesn't seem to really exist or for long, even at the smallest currently known measure degree hence the levels of definitions for it.
Apart from enjoying a very interesting topic, I'm impressed that you've managed to keep straight face throughout the whole video, excellent delivery! Were there many takes? :-)
There you go, an infinity and a nothing explained in one sentence by one wise woman. I'm curious though, given that she is a grandmother, probably born and raised on this planet, did she include gods in the things that people make up or did she think one or more does exist? People often seem to confuse things that are made up with things that don't make sense to them personally, letting them think that everything that makes sense to them is real even thought there is no indication or even an indication of a demonstrable possibility of that in external reality.
There is still something in the box: the 9th level of nothing is in the box. They said they wanted nothing for their birthday but you gave them something that has at least a definition. We can talk about it so clearly it is something :)
Is that how nothing becomes something?😏 P.S. I might also like to add 'something' here, with credit due to the original posting that sprouted this philosophical musing. Isn't level 9 part of the Eisenberg Uncertainty eternal postulate, that the very act of communicating the idea of nothing makes that nothing a something, notwithstanding the use of semantics?
I mean what you are describing would fit into the platonic ideal of 'nothing' and thus be removed at lv8. The fact that we still talk about the idea of it being nothing despite the deliberate stipulation that such ideas be removed is imo just a limitation of either human thoughts in general or english in particular, or maybe it's just my personal lack of imagination. Either way, you shouldn't be able to talk about the emptiness of a lv8 box, and possibly shouldn't be able to even entertain the idea of a lv9 box containing anything. This all sounds very weird, but then again lv3 empty boxes are probably already physically impossible.
Great video! Love the humor and the thoughtfulness, and for the record, l would be devasted by any birthday gift of a level of nothing that made cheese impossible.
I always love telling people to imagine being blind, properly blind, and they usually do the "covers eyes" or "closes eyes" routine. Their minds are usually blown when told that true blindness isn't even that, because true blindness is the absolute absence of sight at all, which is impossible to imagine even if you have actually been blind, partially or fully, because the brain itself is hardwired to visualize. What would happen in the brains of one who cannot visualize is.. beyond me. I don't think we will ever understand that, or even fully understand consciousness itself, but that's just my opinion. Imagining the absence of something is practically impossible because it requires imagining the thing itself as reference. It's like saying "don't think about [thing]", you automatically think about it when processing it, it's impossible not to, unless you hear "don't think about.." and immediately escape the universe to prevent hearing the last part of that sentence. Blinded partially for me, imagine having donut vision with the hole being a void of non-sight, I had that once and it was scary. I can't even begin to explain what it looked like, because that itself is vision-relative. You already can't imagine it, neither can I despite having it once. It was like having a blind spot 10--20x the size. It's like trying to explain another sense to someone without it, quite literally . A negative sense is itself indirectly a sense because their frame-of-reference to the world is different. A lot of these people with true blindness, aka cortical blindness, have the head-room to learn to echo-locate to some degree, because the brain isn't processing the massive amount of information that comes in from the eyes because the part that passes it on is damaged in some way. They also learn to feel better, leading to reading via touch a lot easier than those with vision, and other senses are usually improved to some level, depending on what training they go through. Not everyone goes through the same training to deal with blindness, which is a pretty big oversight, so many suffer for years needlessly. Vision-based tasks take a lot of space in that brain of ours, leaving it free to process other data, which it does very well and surprisingly with little-but-good-quality training. It can even be done in sighted people if you block vision long-term and pass extra-sensory information such as via brain-computer interfaces. A recent breakthrough being a BCI via the tongue - doesn't require surgery, can be worn in the mouth and with some training you can learn to "see" via some other sensory inputs, be it echo-location, IR, UV, magnetic, etc. it is very interesting research that could help out a lot of people in the coming years. It's more a case of trying to figure out the useful safe bandwidth available without blowing your tongue to bits in a non-spectacular fashion. There'd be no explosions, just pain. Overloading the brain is, of course, no joke, as you see with seizures, we don't want that to happen before we start rolling out tongue BCIs. Another huge downside is also a huge BCI invading your breathing and eating hole - not so good. Maybe the roof of the mouth could be used, it is fairly sensitive too. Having to keep it clean would be a pain, but worth it if it allows one to see once again, or possibly for the first time.
I remember reading Jean Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness and he states that nothing cannot be, by definition. He describes some of the ideas you put forth.
My answer to that is, that given that there is anything, then nothingness is absurd. But, if there were nothing, then anything would be absurd. My belief is that the fact that anything exists is absurd, so there's no point explaining why it does.
A good enough answer for me to the "why is there something rather than nothing" question, is that there's only 1 way for there to be nothing but that are countless ways for there to be something.
Interesting but... How do we really know there's only one way for there to be nothing. There could be zero ways. There could also be one way. That's already two possible ways. 😂
@@biermeester Existence Exists, and to exist is to have identity. There is no such *thing* as a *nothing*. That which exists exists as something, that which has no identity does not exist and cannot take up any space. You can never have a kind of nothing. It's impossible. So your original answer is close, but not extreme enough, there are endless ways for things to be, and never a way for a nothing to be a thing.
On the question of why there's something rather than nothing, I quite like the anthropic principle. If there's nothing, we wouldn't exist to even know that there's nothing.
@@SabineHossenfelder I don't see anything inherently wrong with non-existence, and I think partial nothings could exist. It just seems like 'total nothingness' evidently doesn't exist, since 'something' already exists. (It does feel odd to use the word 'already' when the discussing things which might be outside of time, but I think the point still stands.)
@@bozo5632 It's not the answer to the question, rather it demonstrates the absurdity of the question. Kind of like the Puddle Analogy. God by the way isn't the answer, unless god is _nothing._
This reminds me of an argument I had with one of my psychology professors. He wanted us to each answer the question as to whether the displayed cup was half full or half empty. We were allowed only those two answers. I was one of the last to answer and I replied that the cup was always completely full. He didn't like that answer. Just because the answer isn't what we want, or what we are expecting doesn't mean it is wrong.
@@0ptikGhost You're getting far beyond the capability of the average psychology or sociology professor, but that is a sailient point. "Compared to what" is ever the point of reference, but not the only point of reference.
People think that you'd have to have positive worldview to think that the cup is half full. I think if you have a positive mind you'd be more like: "Full or empty, you have cup, you lucky bastard!".
@@libtardiacitizen I think calling space and time "things" is delusive. It would be necessary first to define what a thing is. Because at first glance space and time are not things among the things, they are dispositional aspects of reality. Not to talk about consciousness (not mind).
Concepts are dual to percepts -- the mind duality of Immanuel Kant. Everything (something) is dual to nothing. Being is dual to non-being becoming creates becoming -- Plato's cat. Thesis is dual to anti-thesis creates the converging thesis or synthesis (emergence) -- the time independent Hegelian dialectic or Hegel's cat. Alive is dual to not alive -- the Schrodinger's cat superposition. Particles are dual to anti-particles, spin up is dual to spin down -- the Dirac equation. Schrodinger's cat is based upon Hegel's or Fichte's cat and they stole it from Plato. Duality creates reality. The big bang is an infinite negative curvature singularity and Gaussian negative curvature is defined with two dual points -- Janus holes/points:- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_curvature Points are dual to lines -- the principle of duality in geometry -- non null homotopic. "Always two there are" -- Yoda. Synthesis or emergence is created by duality = Janus points.
Thank you so much Sabine for your channel. . I'm no genius, (maybe) but your clear, memorable explanation of very difficult concepts has enriched my intellectual mind and helped me understand "the big picture" a little better. Thanks again. I'm here every Saturday. P.S. I also love the satirical quips.
The answer to the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" that I like best is that we don't know if a state of "nothing" is even possible. It may be possible, but we have no evidence that such a state ever "existed" at any time in the past.
I don't think it could have. Just by the fact that there is something now it means that there was never a nothing because there was a future of something implying that that nothing was still something.
"Why is there something rather than nothing" is very easy to answer actually. If it would be just "nothing" then there would not be anyone to ask those questions.
Everything (something) is dual to nothing. Being is dual to non-being becoming creates becoming -- Plato's cat. Thesis is dual to anti-thesis creates the converging thesis or synthesis (emergence) -- the time independent Hegelian dialectic or Hegel's cat. Alive is dual to not alive -- the Schrodinger's cat superposition. Particles are dual to anti-particles, spin up is dual to spin down -- the Dirac equation. Schrodinger's cat is based upon Hegel's or Fichte's cat and they stole it from Plato. Duality creates reality. The big bang is an infinite negative curvature singularity and Gaussian negative curvature is defined with two dual points -- Janus holes/points:- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_curvature Points are dual to lines -- the principle of duality in geometry -- non null homotopic. "Always two there are" -- Yoda. Synthesis or emergence is created by duality = Janus points.
@@hyperduality2838 the duality is straight things and curved things. Reality is that matter is not in motion, matter is motion itself. It is the action in the equation 0÷1=0, being the division symbol. Motion is the division of something and nothing. The motion is charge/energy. It is straight, it curves away to avoid conglomeration, as it isn't a thing that can conglomerate. Motion can only...move. Charge/energy which is just motion itself curves into spheres where it would conglomerate. In omnidirectional polar volume of motion this curves leads to spheres with spin barriers. These are the units of matter. This reduction of motion, the curve is gravity. Motion is charge, gravity is the opposite of motion, the curve. But since motion does not conglomerate, it moves, gravity acts then as a battery of motion, or like a coil. It all just motion, metaphysical "had to be" motion because existence cannot not exist, as nothing is impossible. There is only two. Straight things, and curved things. Draw or make or imagine anything with neither.
Yes, they mathematically defind zero, they found how it can obey the rule of value to validate its obvious existence, and in so doing they inadvertently defined the real big bang mathematically as well.
@@hyperduality2838 duality is Scientology and Kabbalah... Unity is Godlike system. Nothing can become from NOTHING. Otherwise is called "something". The quarks' core is trinity and cannot be divided which called "atom" aka uncut. Quarks is the basic matter and its energy which means that matter is energy and Plato tried to define this principle with "The world of ideas" which is not the negative of our world but its the basis...which means our world is the extension of energy. The more you dig backwards the thinner the energy becomes which eventually you end up in light which leads to the so called big bang and gass spinning darkness... The biggest problem is what caused the first cause of the creation of the universe since the matter its actually ancient light ... Because the cause of the first cause has to be outside of time and space...and this is what we call ...God!
@@PlanetDeLaTourette That sounds to me like a number of things: a pair of down-nothings and an up-nothing and the set which they form as well as everything which isn't identical to that set nor any of its members. This seems like something is coming out of nothing...
When I learned about the Big Bang as a kid, I tried to understand HOW the universe could "begin" and WHY it existed. When I tried really hard to imaging what it would be like if the universe just didn't exist, I couldn't imagine true nothingness, total non-existence. I concluded (if that's the right word) that it just wasn't possible for truly "nothing" to exist, and so logically the universe simple had to exist because it couldn't not exist. Somehow, that convinced me at the time.
Surely this has been pointed out below time and time again. But my favorite answer was found in another video, where the university professor told the student: "even if there WERE nothing ---- you still wouldn't be happy".
Anthropomorphic principle: if there were nothing, we couldn't ask why there's something rather than nothing. Loved this video! Your dedication to the birthday present is wonderful!
Is this not just a restatement of the fact that there is, in fact, something rather than nothing? It still does not give any explanation as to how it came about that something exists.
@@codyheiner3636 it is not, and I'll show you. If it were the 'why' of why we exist, then I would not be able to ask the following question: why are we there to ask why there's something rather than nothing? The fact that we are there to ask why is proof that something exists. But why are we there to ask why? That is still unexplained.
@@skylark8828 and why was there an earth to evolve on in the first place? And then why did the matter which constitutes the earth in the first place? And why did the subatomic particles which constitute that matter exist in the first place? Etc. You can go on and on, but there won't actually be an answer at the end.
(5:50) Time does not exist (nor can it exist) in a vacuum of absolute nothingness. If the vacuum is completely empty, there's nothing to demonstrate the effects of time. Some form of existence must be present before time can be made manifest.
I like this argument a lot, but from time's "observer" it seems to me that the non-existing contents of the box have the properties of being absolute, perfect members of their species of thing: vacuum of absolute nothingness, unchanging for long enough to say they _have_ existed, even if we must destroy the vacuum to prove our point by allowing "something" into the box in order to observe it. Or I could ask: don't we through creating this state and making it "unchanging" long enough to say it is absolute, then isn't the property of the absence of change a salient which obliges us to say : "This box has contained nothing for duration _H_" until we open it? It seems to me time will rear its ugly head then mention we refer to the box and know these are the conditions inside the box.
@@cemacmillan **"it seems to me that the non-existing contents of the box have the properties ..."* .. If the contents of the box are nonexistent, then they have no properties. *""This box has contained nothing for duration _H_""* ... Within this vacuum of absolute nonexistence, what frame of reference are you using to assess how long (time) the nonexistent contents have been nonexistent? How are you measuring the length of time when there is no change taking place? *"It seems to me time will rear its ugly head then mention we refer to the box and know these are the conditions inside the box."* ... There are no "conditions" present in a box that is totally void of anything and everything. The moment a condition enters the box, the box is no longer empty. *Conclusion:* A state of absolute nothingness (Nonexistence) is incomprehensible. Comprehensibility requires the existence of "something" in order to comprehend it.
Wonderful video! My own theory is that nothing and everything exist simultaneously in a universe/void that in effect toggles constantly on an infinitismal scale. There is nothing, there is something, all at the same time.
Great video! I would flip (or leave the possibility of a flip) between levels 7 & 8. I reckon Aristotle would be happier with that order. (Flipping 7 & 9 might be possible too but that's a little trickier)
The flat Earth is actually a modern idea. There is not a shred of evidence anywhere in the historical record that any people of the past thought the Earth was flat. The oldest written documents ever found still refer to the Earth as an orb or a globe.
I wonder whether flat earthers and various conspiracy theories (eg "fake" moon landing, etc) are deliberately spread falsehoods whose purpose is to make people reject _all_ conspiracy theories, including the ones that are actually true. I mean, they can't _all_ be wrong, even if the majority of them are.
Hi all! I have a free science newsletter that goes out once per week to which you can subscribe here sabinehossenfelder.com/newsletter/
If you have a topic for a video to suggest, the best way is to reply to the newsletter. I *do* read as many comments as I can. But, well, it's kind of hard to keep track.
Nothing better on a Saturday than a new Sabine video!
I like your vids🤩. Plz keep hitting us with the ugly truth about our absurd universe. We want more about the void, the "free will" , the uncertainty principle, our inability to test the big bang theory and of course the impossibility of finding the truth cuz we might be living in a cyclical universe 🤕. Thanks Sabine
I just want nothing!!
Is that too much to ask?!
Much love and appreciation (from Egypt) for all the knowledge you share. Thank you Sabine.
You forgot level 10. Sure, you got a level 9 in the box, but the box, you, me, the rest of the universe even is related to "what's in the box" or not in it. It has that relationship just by everything else existing around it. You have to get rid of all that to have true nothing in the box. But then, who would make the RUclips video??? By similar reasoning, your last question on screen, "why is there nothing rather than something?" has the similar issue. You can't ask the question if "nothing" was the current state. You could also ask, "Why does blue?" Similar thought processes. Or the deeper Drax philosophy hidden in GOTG, "Why is Gamora?!" lol
Imagine half a million members coming here for nothing.
they came here for something that is called "nothing"
@@v3le something Cannot be called nothing. Unless it is erroneously referred to as nothing =D
@@SolidSiren Everything is something. Nothing is everything , Therefore nothing is something. Logick.
@@SolidSiren But something is always being called nothing.
That's kind of the point of the video.
All words are concepts that represent reality, all concepts are themselves something and the concept known as "nothing" is therefore something.
⛓️😉 Nothing is, nothing does? Not to offend, but, this 'alone' & 'jealous', 'always' & 'forever' business love costs us doesn't make sense to your other half. If not the edge of one thing or another, perhaps you not exist? Why do you think men are usually who ask women out? We need reminding. With the 'men having a higher infidelity rate' meaning 'women take more men off of women than vice versa' (& that it be women women should be afraid of & who'll set women free) & what with the relationship you really think is holy being that between you & what male friend of yours .. marriage only being holy by extension as our agreement to you to keep our mits off your friends ..(your now obviously married friends) I'm not sure why else you as men of our own for god knows what reason exist except for your math, which is obviously shoddy.
It's like you want to grow on us, so our reality become yours like we're male & female angler fish. Like angler fish, we aren't monogamous btw. Never have been, never will. It's that you think we want to be yours no matter whether I can't borrow or ripping the label of our drinks, that we can't tell that every day waking up beside you we feel like we're looking down the barrel of a gun. At nothing.
"Virtual particle pairs are like couples you've never heard of that pop up in your newsfeed, destroy each other and disappear back into nothing, … except with maths" - This one killed me, thanks Sabine!
I thought everything could be explained in terms of intersecting fields, like the Boss-Higgins field?
Are you dead?
Me going into Facebook for the first time in 5 years.
wtf I read this as soon as she started speaking through it
I was waiting for a big yellow Pac-Man to come (from nothing) and eat the moving dots. lol
These jokes being delivered with her somber, straight-faced demeanor is my kind of humor
I am falling in love with this channel.
Everything (something) is dual to nothing.
Being is dual to non-being becoming creates becoming -- Plato's cat.
Thesis is dual to anti-thesis creates the converging thesis or synthesis (emergence) -- the time independent Hegelian dialectic or Hegel's cat.
Alive is dual to not alive -- the Schrodinger's cat superposition.
Particles are dual to anti-particles, spin up is dual to spin down -- the Dirac equation.
Schrodinger's cat is based upon Hegel's or Fichte's cat and they stole it from Plato.
Duality creates reality.
The big bang is an infinite negative curvature singularity and Gaussian negative curvature is defined with two dual points -- Janus holes/points:-
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_curvature
Points are dual to lines -- the principle of duality in geometry -- non null homotopic.
"Always two there are" -- Yoda.
Synthesis or emergence is created by duality = Janus points.
Is that not what is known as "deadpan"?
@@MikinessAnalog She might ride the line of dead pan , but saucy dry is a more accurate description in my view . . . hehe .
@@fractalfelt But is it the line of little white lies . Or better known as " Saving someones Feelings " ?
Sorta like a bonus round when gambling on the outcome of life .
"Like most videos on RUclips, this video is about nothing." That has to be the most accurate thing I've ever heard
I had to pause the video until I stopped laughing at that so I wouldn't miss anything! Hilarious, 'cause it's true!
Actually all of us is already feel the nothingness. Before we born or we exist, thats is actually nothingness feels like. And thats no feels at all.
I understood nothing and I absolutely loved every second of it.
I love this comment thank you so much for writing it
There's 2 layers to this comment 😂
chicken or egg? No answer
@@Tethloach1 I'm a firm believer in the chicken.
@@neino36 'But the chickens are not organised!'
this is the cutest thought experiment I've heard in a while, you literally just wanted to give your friend an absolute nothing box to make them happy for their birthday. It might break everything in the universe but atleast you gave your friend what they wanted :)
When you break it down like that, it really is :D
Well, they would still get the box though, which is something. But at least now we all know to better not give an "empty" box to someone who wants NOTHING 😂😂😂
no but then its not.... 'nothing', its still a birthday present, what they wanted. Even tho that shouldn't be possible-
Pulling so much content from nothing is really something. Keep up the great work!
Once upon a time it was called fantasie and imagination. No it's called science.
@@mj7335 Exactly. See The Logical Leap by David Harriman. Science is basically induction from conceptualized perceptions of concretes, not deductions based on the arbitrary.
Doh! Something from nothing. Wish I'd said that.
Thank You, Sabine, for treating varying philosophies and beliefs with respect, as you in fact continue helping all groups learn more, and even become more excited about science. :)
The paradox that keeps me up at night isn't the notion of nothing, but rather how Sabine can be so ordinary in her delivery, and yet produce such engaging content at the same time.
(I promise this is a compliment, haha - great video!)
I was thinking about that and it would super neat to see out takes of her breaking character.
dead pan humor is a real talent 🤣
it's a video about nothing
It's that low-key sense of humor that does it for me.
This is possibly one of the funniest science videos I have watched (and not a smile).
Next video "The Infinities of Infinity".
If you turn Infinity into a fraction (one over infinity) there is/are infinity fractions between each whole number. How say you?
It's amazing that Sabine has the ability to make us think very deeply about nothing at all. Now that, is something!
*NO... NO.. NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!*
@@PlatonicPluto Next video - "Paradox".
Something from nothing and nothing is free.
@@blueskies792 Nothing isn't free. It's pretty expensive co create 17th century vacuum, let alone level 9 nothing
@@blueskies792 Dire Staits.
I spent half of the video laughing. Both at the non-chalant delivery of humor, and the absolutely absurd directions I would never have imagined going myself. I mean that as compliment - she kept subverting my expectations all I could do was enjoy the ride. Brilliant combination of education and entertainment.
I enjoyed the eloquence of your and other comments almost as much as the video.
Hi Sabine, Thanks for Nothing!
Loved your video which helps clarify how little most of us actually know about Nothing even though we may use the term frequently (and frequently inaccurately).
I've been working on my own personal philosophy working from 'Nothing' and starting on up from there. So, imagine Nothing is ALL there is, no matter, mass, energy, observers, observations, interactions, just limitless, completely empty of everything Nothing. Nothing is the ONLY 'thing' the only one 'thing' (or is that none thing?) This would be indistinguishable from a uniform limitless 'thing' that is constant universally. Nothing then is nothing, one thing and everything, all at the same time. And if that were the true case then we don't exist and we are all just figments of Nothing's imagination - which it could not have as that destroys the concept of no observation or observations etc. Also if Nothing and One thing are indistinguishable from each other there could then be a minimum of two 'things' and we could in theory go on to have an infinite number of 'One Things' that are unlimited by time or distance and none of them would be able to interact with any of the others.
But what if one thing was the exact opposite of Nothing and for some reason they were inextricably bound together... I wonder what the result might be?
Maybe God is the ultimate Nothing that's a barrier against things getting back to Nothing. Rather than creating, Nothing would simply sustain anything and avoid that being equated with it at all costs. I can conceive of a Nothing that fits this idea, which is where you can ask questions but Nothing could give an answer to the questions
@@AdamDylanMajornothing is a barriar againest nothing .... nice
Sabine is getting better and better- hilariously scientific and scientifically hilarious. Don’t you just love her! She’s fabulous. This video on nothing must be one of her best ones.
I feel the opposite. She used to display a little dry humor which I liked. Now she has joined the legion who build the presentations around a comedy routine. I doubt it is her doing. I find it distracting and annoying. Modern audiences are like little children I guess, you need to entertain them to get them to listen.
@@PraiseDog Ha. Disabling the likes in your own crappy videos. Show some integrity, buddy.
@@PraiseDog ... Say what?
@@PraiseDog Science is seriously SERIOUS!
Science is the art of Measuration. If it can't be measured, it's not SCIENTIFIC.
How does one measure humour?
As a teacher, I have often found that light humour can enlighten not just children, but also those of any age without understanding or even interest in a subject much easier than 2,000 pages. LIGHTen up.
@@capcompass9298Some levels of science can only be done by ghosts at the time.
Sabine is the only person I’d tune into to hear about nothing.
Many are forced to hear about it from relatives on every major holiday.
I'd add Michael Stevens to the list. I watched a 40 mins video of his trying to figure out if chairs exist.
@@crowemagnum1337 I think I’ll sit that one out.
@mike I get to listen to it for several hours every day 😃😐😞
Other than Seinfeld. He did a whole series of shows about it!
4:15 -- the best part of Sabine's humor is that it is as on point as it is unexpected
I saw nothing
Well that's something..
I want to start telling ppl that it's 'en pointe' not 'on point'. One down, 7 billion to go.
@Sinna It's still 'en pointe'. (Two down, 7 billion to go).
She’s a savage 😭💀
As someone who has occasionally felt compelled to read a bit into ontology, this was one of the most interesting explorations of this subject I've encountered.
Like many others, I got to know Sabine with her book “Lost in Math”. Since then, she is a value in my life.
This discussion about 9 levels of nothing reminds me of the opening sentence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s masterpiece Tractatus: “The world is everything that is the case”. I am a mortal bookworm with a computer science degree, not a philosopher. Here is my subjective interpretation of the sentence and connection to the discussion.
By “the world”, Wittgenstein actually refers to the whole universe. I understand this sentence somewhat as: “Anything that we can say is limited to be about this universe”, in a more open form: “The expressive power of human language is specific and limited to express facts about this universe.”
I think anything beyond Level 5 is beyond the expressive power of human language, whose origin is our universe full of things, and designed to talk about things. It does not mean that we cannot construct sentences about these concepts, but it means that the meaning conveyed by these sentences will have to be distorted just as an irregular piece of glass distorts the image behind.
Even Level 5 is problematic. Look at the sentence “Sometimes virtual particles can become real” at 5:17. As you would think deeper and deeper on the definitions of “real”, “virtual”, “become”, “can” and “sometimes”, you may notice the distortion introduced by the lens of language.
Almost certainly, we cannot construct a sentence about a place where “there are no laws of nature”, and expect it to be free of problems.
I personally think a lot of language distortion is similarly the main cause of why we see the sub-atomic quantum world “weird”. In describing the double slit experiment, for instance, we often talk about the “poor” electron trying to “decide” which slit to pass through, and then with not enough time to decide, it goes through both at the same time. Clearly, the language and its constituent metaphors, evolved to express facts about universe at our human scale is introducing distortion.
I am grateful to you Sabine for the thought provoking episode, you have a visible impact.
Distortion introduced by the lens of langıage... 🤔🤔🤔
👍
I also immediately thought of Wittgenstein when we started talking about the lack of mind to conceptualise the box
If you want to go further, modern language is simply a distortion of old language, with ancient words getting distorted into similar metaphors, which become dead and then simply describe abstract concepts or new objects. So when you speak about distortion introduced by the lense of language, you have to question way more than one would usually like to question and it is certainly not limited to concepts outside this universe. I'd also argue Wittgenstein is probably not referring to language distortion. We already have to distort our language quite a lot to explain and grasp things very much "being the case". And after a while we do not recognize a former distortion as a distortion anymore.
You raised some thought provoking ideas thank you! I see it in a similar way it I don’t think language is the limiting factor but instead intelligence. Much like animals could never understand the universe in the way humans can we are incapable of understanding concepts that are beyond our universe. Even if we found a way to increase our intelligence or ascend to a higher level of understanding or awareness, intelligence itself is still a concept from within our universe
“The world” is all of reality, not just our universe. As far as I know at least, I’ve heard it used in a couple philosophical arguments and defined as such.
I love how she puts down physicists and cosmologists that try to get away with creating a universe out of nothing, but not really NOTHING.
Everything (something) is dual to nothing.
Being is dual to non-being becoming creates becoming -- Plato's cat.
Thesis is dual to anti-thesis creates the converging thesis or synthesis (emergence) -- the time independent Hegelian dialectic or Hegel's cat.
Alive is dual to not alive -- the Schrodinger's cat superposition.
Particles are dual to anti-particles, spin up is dual to spin down -- the Dirac equation.
Schrodinger's cat is based upon Hegel's or Fichte's cat and they stole it from Plato.
Duality creates reality.
The big bang is an infinite negative curvature singularity and Gaussian negative curvature is defined with two dual points -- Janus holes/points:-
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_curvature
Points are dual to lines -- the principle of duality in geometry -- non null homotopic.
"Always two there are" -- Yoda.
Synthesis or emergence is created by duality = Janus points.
@@hyperduality2838 The dualism is what we need to think beyond. We have hit a wall of understanding
@@jayrathjen1127 Concepts are dual to percepts -- the mind duality of Immanuel Kant.
Relax dude I am hitting you with the 4th law of thermodynamics!
"Entropy is a measure of randomness" -- Roger Penrose.
Syntropy is a measure of order.
Randomness (entropy, uncertainty) is dual to order (syntropy, certainty).
Certainty is dual to uncertainty -- the Heisenberg certainty/uncertainty principle.
From a converging, convex (lens) or syntropic perspective everything looks divergent, concave or entropic -- the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
All observers have a syntropic perspective according to the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
My syntropy is your entropy and your syntropy is my entropy -- duality!
Syntropy (prediction) is dual to increasing entropy -- the 4th law of thermodynamics!
Teleological physics (syntropy) is dual to non-teleological physics (entropy).
Mind (the internal soul, syntropy) is dual to matter (the external soul, entropy) -- Descartes or Plato's divided line.
There are patterns of duality hardwired into physics, mathematics & philosophy.
Schrodinger's cat is based upon Hegelian philosophy or metaphysics but the books do not tell you that.
Bosons (symmetric wave functions, waves) are dual to Fermions (anti-symmetric wave functions, particles) -- wave/particle or quantum duality.
Bosons are dual to Fermions -- atomic duality.
You and your mind are built form atoms hence duality.
Energy is duality, duality is energy.
Energy is dual to mass -- Einstein.
Dark matter is dual to dark energy.
That is the good news.
Good news is dual to bad news.
The bad news is that main stream physics is currently dominated by materialists or teleophobia.
Teleophilia is dual to teleophobia.
Signals (patterns, order, predictability, syntropy) are dual to noise (randomness, unpredictability, entropy).
"The brain is a prediction machine" -- Karl Friston, neuroscientist.
Making predictions to track, targets, goals and objectives is a syntropic process -- teleological.
There is a dual process to that of increasing entropy namely syntropy.
Syntropic processes are dual to entropic processes.
@@hyperduality2838 And orange isn't dual to red, so please stuff it. Your useless duality is useless, which is dual to useful in all it's degrees of usefulness, which you lack.
@@stylis666 Colours are actually dual -- electro-magnetic energy.
Duality leads to the 4th law of thermodynamics! Your comment is asinine.
Steve Pinker's favorite joke goes as follows. The student asks the teacher "Why is there something rather than nothing?" The teacher responds, "Ah, even if there wasn't you still wouldn't be satisfied."
Love your channel, your content and the honest delivery spiced with dry humour Sabine. I remember a period in the '80s when physics and eastern philosophy/religion started dating. (I think) Fritjof Capra started it with 'The Tao of Physics'. There were others as well such as Gary Zukav's "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" . Books such as these were generally entertaining/thoughtful without going too von Daniken in how they presented their material. This reminded me how much I enjoyed the intersection of physics and philosophy.
That sounds like it could interest me. Would you still recommend? Where do I start? ^^
12:56 All I can think of is the anthropic principle: if there were nothing, we wouldn't be here to ask "Why is there something?"
Everything (something) is dual to nothing.
Being is dual to non-being becoming creates becoming -- Plato's cat.
Thesis is dual to anti-thesis creates the converging thesis or synthesis (emergence) -- the time independent Hegelian dialectic or Hegel's cat.
Alive is dual to not alive -- the Schrodinger's cat superposition.
Particles are dual to anti-particles, spin up is dual to spin down -- the Dirac equation.
Schrodinger's cat is based upon Hegel's or Fichte's cat and they stole it from Plato.
Duality creates reality.
The big bang is an infinite negative curvature singularity and Gaussian negative curvature is defined with two dual points -- Janus holes/points:-
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_curvature
Points are dual to lines -- the principle of duality in geometry -- non null homotopic.
"Always two there are" -- Yoda.
Synthesis or emergence is created by duality = Janus points.
There can only always already have been something, just because nothing cannot ever be. The only being that truly comes from nothing, is that being which is never what it is: namely yourself as pure subject.
@@duprie37 nah dog, at some point for some amount of time there was literally nothing in all directions forever.
@@CaptainMisery86 If there still was "time", then it wasnt truly nothing. If there was literally nothing, nothing could come to exist.
Since there is something, we are here to ask "Why isn't there nothing". The anthropic principle doesn't answer the question why, or how, just that it is so that things exist including ourselves.
There is another level of Nothing missing from the list. Level 0 if you like. It's the absence of something expected to be there. For example a series of opaque jars that normally contain cookies. When asked what is in jar 1, you may answer Ten chocolate chip, Jar 2 contains five biscotti, Jar 3 may contains the crumbs from custard cremes but that can be described as 'Nothing'. In the present box in the video, if it contained bubble wrap and a piece of packing tape it would still be classed as empty or containing nothing because when compared to expectations, it contains nothing.
Thanks!
Love seeing Lost in Math on my shelf, and your videos in my feed.
Your works are valuable, and as a physics student, I find your content inspiring! Keep up the amazing work.
The box needs a big warning: Always think OUTSIDE the box. To think inside the box would ruin it.
But the box has no “inside”
Brilliant
@@AdrianBoyko If that's true, how can it be a box? Example: If you have a steel cube that you say is a box that doesn't have an "inside", then the material the box is made out of becomes the thing that is inside the box.
@spaz what box?
@@SG2048-meta .
Thanks Sabine. You explain very deep and complex things with clarity and an infectious energy!
I’ve been a big fan of closer to truth for years. I’m glad to see She’s interested in his thoughts, ideas, and questions as well. She’s so awesome
She was at CTT recently.
@@jareknowak8712 sweet I’ll Mosdef check that out soon. Thx! For t he headz up
Interesting and funny. That was worth subscribing. Thanks for the videos
I heard someone say once "when has someone ever observed a nothing to know it's possible or how it works?". I'm now not convinced nothing was ever a thing, but I did use to buy into the concept.
I remember taking acid and on the come up remembering a conversation about the wetness of water with my brother in law. This led me to a completely different understanding about what nothing might be or not be.
I started thinking about nothing over 60 years ago, I'm happy to know it is something. Thank you Sabine for taking the time to go somewhere out of the box with your your take on this invisible, place holding subject...
"I really think people are way too respectful of all the stuff physicist make up and get away with, just because their maths is incomprehenseable" Hut ab für dieses ehrliche Geständnis einer Wissenschaftlerin
It really feels like physicists just become philosophers at that point, with all methodological problems of philosophy attached. But instead of using language, they are using math, which may make their findings even less useful ironically.
Incomprehensible
@JoniWan77 as an aspiring philosopher I would agree with you, but I would caveat that the ‘methodological problems’ in philosophy are intractable.
Recommend looking into ‘the criterion problem’.
Basically it notices that it is by an implicit philosophy of epistemology that we decide any methodology to be ‘good’.
What you evaluate as a ‘problem’ in a methodology will be based on a particular set of axioms, but accounting for these axioms is it’s own identical evaluation problem, and there is simply no obvious way to close that hole in a worldview.
@@thomaskilroy3199 Problem may have been the wrong word. I am myself a student of literature. I simply believe it is important to be aware of one's methodology and how it impacts your findings. The methods of a humanities scholar for example lead to findings, which are very different in nature than those of a scientist. Especially scientists and to a degree economics scholars seem to not be aware of the differences most of the time, which makes their own dealings with similar methodology seem a tad naive and arrogant at the same time in my experience.
@JoniWan77 yes I agree, though it is not always arrogance, but different fields do often forget how to make each other’s methodologies talk to each other.
Thank you!! Inspiring!!! My thought game: a vacuum is a nothingness that still is something. A void is a nothingness that still is something. And then a nothingness that is beyond time and space. And further a nothing that is beyond - the beyond. Never existed and never will exist. Can't even cease because it never was or will be. Nothing that is nothing is not…🙏
This is your best work! Very original
Video: "Nothing"
90k people: "Hmm, interesting."
Well that nothing escalated quickly.😁
Seinfeld: I already did that
@@Cyberplayer5 My guess is that is how the universe arose. Keep in mind it's a guess, not a belief.
Love this video, the concept of nothing haunted me when I was younger, very nice to have these different levels explained like this, and your sense of humor really made it fun too :) Thank you for all you do!
Nothing= not anything or non-existence. There you go a definition of nothing that is absolute. Someone once told me nothing is what sleeping rocks dream of, if you want to be poetic about it.
@jimmontg even "non existence" and "not anything" are something, because they are ideas
I understand you, the concept still haunts me to this day, the same as the meaning of eternity.
Finally a video about me.
I love your time spent on the philosophical aspect of a lot of your topics. Theoretical science without philosophy is like cooking without the intent of eating.
that's a beautiful analogy N.
I have watched a few of Sabine's videos and they all make me laugh, I like her sense of humour; at 8:34 this one cracked me up. I also agree that something cannot come from nothing and how can we trust scientists who come up with incomprehensible formulas. Thank you, Sabine, for presenting information in an understandable way.
I can see that clip coming up on Apologist channels - "Even a scientist says you can't trust other scientists!"
@@Cheepchipsable Of course you can't trust scientists, unless they're also experts in every other field like epistemology, modal logic, philosophy etc etc.
A "scientist" who doesn't understand the difference between Inductive methods of science, where large, randomized, controlled samples with experimentation that can be repeated at will; and the other things they ramble on about, pertaining to abductive reasoning, that can never be repeated, like infinite parallel universes, multiverse, conditions prior to expansion, the definition of "nothing", and so much more, they literally have no idea what they are saying (a vast majority of the time), needs to say a lot less on such subjects.
They're trying to deduce such explanations into existence, just as apologists do for God, except that apologists rely on things like good metaphysics, modal and propositional logic, whereas a vast majority of "scientists" don't even know what they are (nor do they need to, if they'd stick to their jobs, instead of making silly annunciations pertaining to things like philosophy and religion).
Amazingly in-depth analysis of Seinfeld
What's the deal with all this nothing? Lol
As they say, "You'll Own Nothing and Be Happy" - so happiness is Level 10! Gotta remove that too
Promises by politicians surely counts as nothing - on so many levels.
That’s a whole new dimension of nothing.
Level 69 nothing is Level 9 nothing + politician promises
Gives new meaning to the phrase, “Nothing really matters.”
Scaramouche Scaramouche . . . can you do the Fandango ????????
That was brilliant. My head exploded half way though, but it was nothing.
I'd suggest two extra levels of not nothingness. The social levels...
Level 10 when asking your partner "what's the matter?"
Level 11 When asking your partner "what are you thinking about?"
And the Hitchhikers Guide to not nothingness....
12 What's the meaning of life? (Clue: it's a universal constant)
You need to downgrade quite a few levels of nothing to acheive those nothings which are somethings they're nothings... Which are.. Somethings... Which... Are.... Nothings... Which then can't be nothings!? Goddamnit so nothing means nothing!
@@marko.rankovic If not something is nothing then is not nothing yesthing? Maybe we're asking the wrong thing and we should be asking if there is not yesthing.
But then what about antiyesthing and antinothing? Is that even a thing?
I love this video. I tried to imagine nothing once but I couldn't do it. Same with infinity.
Try meditating, it's the easiest way to imagine nothing :p And for infinity you can just start small and go from there. Instead of making infinity big, you keep dividing an arbitrary imagined number. Physically that will have a barrier, but in maths you can just have infinite numbers between 1 and 2 and between every two numbers you put there you can put another infinity of numbers that keep getting smaller and smaller and then you have an infinity within an infinity.
Or here's a way to imagine both at the same time, an infinity and absolute nothing:
Imagine what people do. You know, stuff like singing, walking, falling on their asses, baking a cake, saying hi or giving a compliment.
Now compare that to what all gods have ever done: nothing.
Now compare infinite gods doing what they do to you giving one person a smile to make them feel better: nothing from infinite gods and you did infinitely more than all gods combined ever did in the history of existence. See how easy that was?
@@stylis666 Your comment really was a load of shower thoughts until the last two paragraphs. Those were just facts.
I feel like nothing and infinity are closely related. Nothing is an infinite lack of something.
It is not because of a limitation of your brain that you couldn't imagine those things. It is because you tried to imagine something which cannot exist.
@@KhallDrake nice one
I LOVE this video Sabine. Brilliance, logic, humor, everything that makes for an excellent teaching video and nothing we don't need. 😉
Hello Sabine. This is by far one my favorite episodes. Thank you. I've had an idea rattling around my brain for a couple of decades now, that this episode seems to validate in some fashion. My thought experiment suggests that when you have nothing, you are left with nothing but possibility. I think you said as much also. Then I wondered if in the absence of time, presumably the condition prior to the big bang, if an "infinite amount of time" is actually indistinguishable from "instantaneousness." If we could agree on that, then given just the possibility of a particle popping into existence out of nothing would be a 100 percent surety since all other possibilities (like nothing happening at all for instance) will have been exhausted -- throughout an infinite eternity of nothing happening having played itself out. In my mind, the instant "nothingness" is achieved somehow, "somethingness" must instantaneously show up to fill the void. I'd love to hear some future thoughts that explore this further. ps. Love your videos. Alles gute, Uwe
Hello Uwe, Thank you for sharing your thought experiment and describing it so succinctly as wondering “if an infinite amount of time is indistinguishable from instantaneous.” I’ve likewise wondered about this for many years and keep feeling like it leads to interesting possibilities. Perhaps we could mull it over if there is a way to connect. All the best, William
NOTHING and EVERYTHING exist simultaneously, just as E = M.
We can ask if the number 0 is a true nothing or is it the nothing that comprises everything (infinity) and thereby remains in equilibrium. 0 manifesting as all possibilities, including their opposites (matter, anti-matter)
In such a scenario, the Many Worlds Interpretation seems more plausible, as the probability becomes 1/infinity, which mathematically is not meaningful, but appears to illustrate that every moment can branch out in innumerable ways, and the sum of all such moments/worlds lead to equilibrium.
Time is also an illusion in this framework from the vantage point of the 0, because no change is happening, and everything happens simultaneously. Like if a 0 splits itself into a -1 and a +1, there is no change and therefore no passage of time. The various moments/facets of existence of anything/particle/life-form etc. are akin to different numbers that are already inside the zero and balanced by their opposite counterparts.
Remaining solemn and serious all through and yet make every word funny is a rare talent ❤️
This talent is usually reserved for those of British persuation...
Even a level 9 box of nothing would soon have a cat jumping into it. Unless it was dead.
At that level of nothing, the cat wouldn't even know there was a nothing to jump into, dead or alive.
Ha ha 😂 you must be a physicist (scholar from Schrödinger) - good comment 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
......isn't that resolved at five or six???
Mayhaps that box would have infinite cats in it, some of them dead.
@@Eliphas_Leary, but, if it contains something, even possibilities of the set containing 🐈, both dead 💀, dead/alive, and alive, it loses levels of nothing?
You did a really good job of explaining it, you broke down every concept and made it easier for some to understand.
"True nothing" is the absence of all concepts and possibilities, therefore "nothing" will never exist, and there will always be something, there is no conceivable possibilities that allow "nothing" to exist.
1) Is calculus the way we deal with getting as close to zero (nothing) as possible? 2) If you take away time (which is change) do not you also remove any potentials? 2) a Haiku : if there's nothing - it separates everything - if not, nothing does 3) is there the inverse of nothing (infinity)? 4) Why can we use zero in equations but not infinity (is one a real number and the other not)?
I love your videos and this one was very entertaining.
I watched it some days ago and now it got me thinking about Nothing.
For me, Nothing is just a concept - with different levels as you explained -. There is nothing like nothing outside our thoughts and concepts, so you can't give someone nothing by giving him something.
If he wants nothing for his birthday, you just don't give him anything. If you do give him the box, there is still the box.
This is a a nice video, Sabine, interesting and light- hearted.
As a mathematician, there are two other answers: the empty set (and von Neumann's beautiful idea of constructing all of the natural numbers - and thence all of mathematics- out of it using set theory), and zero probability (you can
have events which are "impossible" in the sense of having probability zero, and yet can actually happen.) An example is choosing a point at random from the unit interval; the probability of choosing exactly that point beforehand is zero, hence impossible, and yet you did it! (So in this way mathematicians are doing the impossible every day!)
A very different type of "nothing" is the nothing of zen Buddhism, which has maybe four aspects: it's actually quite fascinating from an intellectual point of view; it can only be talked about using paradoxical statements to point at what is meant; but it can only be really understood by "practice", which in its simplest-to-explain form comes out of doing
zen meditation. The fourth aspect is that this is actually extremely practical as experiencing glimpses of this
"nothingness" tends to be very healthy for our emotions, mind and body, essentially bringing one back to the state of
"being yourself", acting very appropriately and naturally, without perhaps the usual stress and anger or fear we might
often feel.
Intellectually, this sort of "nothing" can be summarized by saying "no distinctions". Then "everything" is the same as "nothing" as everything is the same as everything else. This is one of those paradoxical statements I mentioned.
This is different from set theory as "everything" would correspond to the Universe, the set of all sets, which by Russell's fascinating paradox is not itself a set. Sorry, that's just an aside! But once you grasp the intellectual idea of
"everything is nothing", you can legitimately ask, "So what?". The point here is that understanding something is not the
same thing as experiencing it deeply. Experiencing it deeply has itself many levels. (And yet of course doesn't have any levels at all!) But what I mean is that the first time you really feel this, it's pretty mind-blowing. It's an experience which is truly beyond words and is not even really an experience at all as it can't be labelled at all. This is a kind of mini-enlightenment or "opening". But, the next moment or the next day this is worth very little. (That and $3.50 will buy you a cup of espresso!) Really it only serves as a memory to remind you to try to sit down every morning on your black cushion for 20-40 minutes and try to just, well, just sit there, with relaxed breathing and good posture. Once you get kinda good at that, which may take decades (speaking from personal experience) it starts to become easier to get past the gates of annoyance and impatience and even physical or emotional pain and just be there. The consequence of all this is that afterwards, you may find yourself spontaneously doing something you had been putting off or might be kinder to a friend or a random stranger, or might suddenly have an unexpected spring in your step or twinkle in your eye. Or not! But that kind of nothing is, one might say, definitely worth Something!
My favorite reference for Set Theory is Halmos' little book, and for zen is the Soto zen of Dogen, as explained by
Suzuki Roshi in his lectures which can be found at cuke.com. Since zen can't really be explained directly in a useful way,
many people try to point at it by way of a painting (like the famous Japanese or Chinese artworks) or by a poem.
(But it can be just as well expressed in anything ...)
Dogen was often poetic and said something like this:
To study the Buddha way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be awakened by all things.
When awakened by all things, your body and mind drop away.
When your body and mind drop away,
No trace of this realization remains,
And this no-trace continues forever...
Hmm, an atypical carnal experience(biblically speaking). This reminds me of a bible verse. 2 Timothy 3:7 always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.
An interesting analysis, I'll be true official. Your careful mathematical observations are appreciated; however, if the goal of Zen Meditation is a return of the Soul to Nothingness, then this is, in my best estimation, illogical. For there is no such thing as "Nothing".
Your Probability Zero is not 0%, it is a probability of 1/infinity - which approaches 0 but is still possible (infinitesimal).
A true 0% probability is the chance of rolling a 100 on a 6 sided die with faces 1,2,3,4,5,6.
You can divide by an infinitesimal, while you cannot divide by 0.
@@aaronbredon2948 Understood. I believe the Mandelbrot Set best demonstrates your point. In Mathematics, zero is the absence of value, but in reality, there can never be a total absence of anything. If time, space, matter, or even a Divine Spirit never existed, neither would we.
The 10th level of nothing is Sergeant Schultz, "I know nothing, NOTHING."
Or Manuel ruclips.net/video/nX7CeTXoxyU/видео.html
11th...no box
12th: ...
... No comment!
I wonder if Germans consider Hogan's Hero's as offensive?
@@MrWildbill My dad absolutely thought Hogan's Heros was offensive. He was born in Germany in 1935, and his father - my Opa - was sent to die in the Eastern Front for the crime of meeting with others in a church basement. He thought a TV sit-com about living under Nazi rule was beyond belief, and it was forbidden in our house. Nazis were never anything to be taken lightly.
I've been binging your channel since I've discovered it a few days ago. I love how you give every idea a fair chance! I also have a subject request: would you be interested in covering the idea of "Elektrosmog"? Somebody I know claims to be very sensitive to it, and I am sceptical about the whole concept (not her symptoms, but the way she attributes them to electromagnetic pollution or whatever). But since I've watched your video on 5G, I think that maybe I shouldn't dismiss her idea off-hand.
She has the greatest sly jokes.
@Bianca Arlette By following trades do you mean copying her trades,as its done in etoro? Are you giving her your money or the money stays on your account? I have heard about copying trades but have not looked into it but I have an idea of what it is.
@Bianca Arlette I'm glad you advised to look her name online to see her portfolio,this is very important, making your own research is very essential. Thank you so much.
This is a great info, I remember my friends calling me crazy when i started investing in digital assets, now i shut them up with the current growth.
@@zilla5749 Haha, yeah, it's amazing how these scammers are using bots and their fake conversations on Sabine's video, as if they want to prove A.I. has passed the Turing test...but of course they fail BIGLY
Very enlightening. Thank you for "nothing". 😁
I am a regular viewer of your channel, and it's getting better and better (just like expanding universe). Thank you.
Nice recap of Nothing! I very much liked Krauss' books "Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science" and The Physics of Star Trek, but felt that "A Universe from Nothing" cheated the reader as the level of Nothing he chose to start with wasn't empty enough. So I'm glad you mentioned that. I enjoy your discourse.
Sabine, you are most definitely a philosopher. Don’t take that the wrong way! Highest compliment.
You’re a comedian as well. Also a compliment.
Yes, she is all of that. What she is not is a good physicist. ;-)
@@schmetterling4477 In what respect? Curious.
@@cheeseheadfiddle Read her papers. You will have a good laugh. :-)
Accurate af, with absurdly entertaining jokes!
Semantics about this is everything we wanted to hear from Sabine at some point and it happened.
Other physicists and people need to see this video to maybe help them realize....something about the what we really mean when we say "nothing" and the fact that it depends on the context.
So, "nothing" doesn't seem to really exist or for long, even at the smallest currently known measure degree hence the levels of definitions for it.
Relativity is a concept not talked about much in this vid, which has to do a lot with the physics and philosophy of one
@@lukedowneslukedownes5900 It wasn't the subject of the video, clearly.
Apart from enjoying a very interesting topic, I'm impressed that you've managed to keep straight face throughout the whole video, excellent delivery! Were there many takes? :-)
What my grandmother used to say:
"There are many more things that don't exist in the universe than things that exist."
Interesting....., Any idea what method Grandma used to conduct a complete inventory of the cosmological warehouse that we call The Universe...?
@@Aryankingz Any idea what method Grandma used to conduct a complete inventory of the cosmological warehouse that we call Nothing?
@@Aryankingz I can't ask her anymore because she died long ago and added another non-existence to nothingness.
There you go, an infinity and a nothing explained in one sentence by one wise woman.
I'm curious though, given that she is a grandmother, probably born and raised on this planet, did she include gods in the things that people make up or did she think one or more does exist? People often seem to confuse things that are made up with things that don't make sense to them personally, letting them think that everything that makes sense to them is real even thought there is no indication or even an indication of a demonstrable possibility of that in external reality.
This is actually way more mind blowing than the ton of scientists and philosophers trying to explain nothing 🤯
There is still something in the box: the 9th level of nothing is in the box. They said they wanted nothing for their birthday but you gave them something that has at least a definition. We can talk about it so clearly it is something :)
Is that how nothing becomes something?😏
P.S. I might also like to add 'something' here, with credit due to the original posting that sprouted this philosophical musing.
Isn't level 9 part of the Eisenberg Uncertainty eternal postulate, that the very act of communicating the idea of nothing makes that nothing a something, notwithstanding the use of semantics?
I mean what you are describing would fit into the platonic ideal of 'nothing' and thus be removed at lv8. The fact that we still talk about the idea of it being nothing despite the deliberate stipulation that such ideas be removed is imo just a limitation of either human thoughts in general or english in particular, or maybe it's just my personal lack of imagination.
Either way, you shouldn't be able to talk about the emptiness of a lv8 box, and possibly shouldn't be able to even entertain the idea of a lv9 box containing anything. This all sounds very weird, but then again lv3 empty boxes are probably already physically impossible.
well, to be pedantic, you're getting a BOX, and that's "something".
No, that got removed in step 8. Note that step 8 requires the annihilation of all reality. Happy Birthday!
Only one being knows what true nothing is.
"Nothing comes from nothing
Nothing ever could
So somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good"
(Richard Rodgers)
Thank you for the video.
Yeah, thanks for nothing I guess!
@@notanemoprog Hahaha! Good one
you are a great teacher, you make simplify a very complex idea.
"Even the best theory can't explain its own existence" Perfect!
Exactly, the 2k page proof at 12:32 can't even apply to nothings 8 & 9 since there would be no truth statements or reasoning to work with.
Great video! Love the humor and the thoughtfulness, and for the record, l would be devasted by any birthday gift of a level of nothing that made cheese impossible.
I always love telling people to imagine being blind, properly blind, and they usually do the "covers eyes" or "closes eyes" routine.
Their minds are usually blown when told that true blindness isn't even that, because true blindness is the absolute absence of sight at all, which is impossible to imagine even if you have actually been blind, partially or fully, because the brain itself is hardwired to visualize. What would happen in the brains of one who cannot visualize is.. beyond me. I don't think we will ever understand that, or even fully understand consciousness itself, but that's just my opinion.
Imagining the absence of something is practically impossible because it requires imagining the thing itself as reference. It's like saying "don't think about [thing]", you automatically think about it when processing it, it's impossible not to, unless you hear "don't think about.." and immediately escape the universe to prevent hearing the last part of that sentence.
Blinded partially for me, imagine having donut vision with the hole being a void of non-sight, I had that once and it was scary. I can't even begin to explain what it looked like, because that itself is vision-relative. You already can't imagine it, neither can I despite having it once. It was like having a blind spot 10--20x the size.
It's like trying to explain another sense to someone without it, quite literally . A negative sense is itself indirectly a sense because their frame-of-reference to the world is different. A lot of these people with true blindness, aka cortical blindness, have the head-room to learn to echo-locate to some degree, because the brain isn't processing the massive amount of information that comes in from the eyes because the part that passes it on is damaged in some way. They also learn to feel better, leading to reading via touch a lot easier than those with vision, and other senses are usually improved to some level, depending on what training they go through. Not everyone goes through the same training to deal with blindness, which is a pretty big oversight, so many suffer for years needlessly.
Vision-based tasks take a lot of space in that brain of ours, leaving it free to process other data, which it does very well and surprisingly with little-but-good-quality training. It can even be done in sighted people if you block vision long-term and pass extra-sensory information such as via brain-computer interfaces. A recent breakthrough being a BCI via the tongue - doesn't require surgery, can be worn in the mouth and with some training you can learn to "see" via some other sensory inputs, be it echo-location, IR, UV, magnetic, etc. it is very interesting research that could help out a lot of people in the coming years. It's more a case of trying to figure out the useful safe bandwidth available without blowing your tongue to bits in a non-spectacular fashion. There'd be no explosions, just pain. Overloading the brain is, of course, no joke, as you see with seizures, we don't want that to happen before we start rolling out tongue BCIs. Another huge downside is also a huge BCI invading your breathing and eating hole - not so good. Maybe the roof of the mouth could be used, it is fairly sensitive too. Having to keep it clean would be a pain, but worth it if it allows one to see once again, or possibly for the first time.
I remember reading Jean Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness and he states that nothing cannot be, by definition. He describes some of the ideas you put forth.
Correct. If attention is drawn to nothing, it automatically comes into existence and becomes something.
My answer to that is, that given that there is anything, then nothingness is absurd. But, if there were nothing, then anything would be absurd. My belief is that the fact that anything exists is absurd, so there's no point explaining why it does.
A good enough answer for me to the "why is there something rather than nothing" question, is that there's only 1 way for there to be nothing but that are countless ways for there to be something.
Interesting argument!
@Arbane's Sword of Agility It doesn't. But the question was why, not _how_ ;-)
I like that answer. And one juxtaposed with infinity is indistinguishable from zero.
Interesting but... How do we really know there's only one way for there to be nothing. There could be zero ways. There could also be one way. That's already two possible ways. 😂
@@biermeester Existence Exists, and to exist is to have identity. There is no such *thing* as a *nothing*. That which exists exists as something, that which has no identity does not exist and cannot take up any space. You can never have a kind of nothing. It's impossible. So your original answer is close, but not extreme enough, there are endless ways for things to be, and never a way for a nothing to be a thing.
On the question of why there's something rather than nothing, I quite like the anthropic principle. If there's nothing, we wouldn't exist to even know that there's nothing.
Yes, but what's wrong with that?
If the question is why there IS something, then the anthropic principle is no answer.
There still could be something even if we did not exist. There was something before we (as humans) or as individuals existed
@@SabineHossenfelder I don't see anything inherently wrong with non-existence, and I think partial nothings could exist. It just seems like 'total nothingness' evidently doesn't exist, since 'something' already exists. (It does feel odd to use the word 'already' when the discussing things which might be outside of time, but I think the point still stands.)
@@bozo5632
It's not the answer to the question, rather it demonstrates the absurdity of the question. Kind of like the Puddle Analogy.
God by the way isn't the answer, unless god is _nothing._
This reminds me of an argument I had with one of my psychology professors. He wanted us to each answer the question as to whether the displayed cup was half full or half empty. We were allowed only those two answers.
I was one of the last to answer and I replied that the cup was always completely full. He didn't like that answer.
Just because the answer isn't what we want, or what we are expecting doesn't mean it is wrong.
Given that an atom is mostly empty space, I'd argue the cup is mostly empty.
@@0ptikGhost hahaha good one...so the dilemma still holds. And the pupil still need to face it philosophically.
@@0ptikGhost You're getting far beyond the capability of the average psychology or sociology professor, but that is a sailient point.
"Compared to what" is ever the point of reference, but not the only point of reference.
People think that you'd have to have positive worldview to think that the cup is half full. I think if you have a positive mind you'd be more like: "Full or empty, you have cup, you lucky bastard!".
@@libtardiacitizen I think calling space and time "things" is delusive. It would be necessary first to define what a thing is. Because at first glance space and time are not things among the things, they are dispositional aspects of reality. Not to talk about consciousness (not mind).
SO MANY IDEAS i love this channel, videos never disappoint
This is one of the funniest episodes. Already at level 2 I felt this 'nothing' is gonna cost me a lot.
"In a nutshell, the universe is 4% visible, 23% undetectable and 73% unimaginable." ~Tim Radford
Replace the word unimaginable with just plain imaginary and your on the right track
@@SunShine-xc6dh hahaha, much agreed. When it comes to describing LCDM, imaginary takes on new meaning.
@@jimsteen911 such as fake? Made up? Not existing in the real world? Giving names to errors instead of fixing them?
Concepts are dual to percepts -- the mind duality of Immanuel Kant.
Everything (something) is dual to nothing.
Being is dual to non-being becoming creates becoming -- Plato's cat.
Thesis is dual to anti-thesis creates the converging thesis or synthesis (emergence) -- the time independent Hegelian dialectic or Hegel's cat.
Alive is dual to not alive -- the Schrodinger's cat superposition.
Particles are dual to anti-particles, spin up is dual to spin down -- the Dirac equation.
Schrodinger's cat is based upon Hegel's or Fichte's cat and they stole it from Plato.
Duality creates reality.
The big bang is an infinite negative curvature singularity and Gaussian negative curvature is defined with two dual points -- Janus holes/points:-
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_curvature
Points are dual to lines -- the principle of duality in geometry -- non null homotopic.
"Always two there are" -- Yoda.
Synthesis or emergence is created by duality = Janus points.
And 169% imaginable.
“Nothing is what rocks dream about”
-Aristotle
The future is just as fixed as the past; the (4d) cosmos is static.
"Life" ( those videogames playing in our heads ) is everything & nothing.
@@jeffrelf Wow, pass that stuff around
Therefore Laurence Krause is a rock...?
If its a dream, it's something!
@@Savantjazzcollective exactly
Loved your 3 answer recap. You're hired.
In these times I get closer and closer to the definition of nothing with each new bank statement...
Great video, I love paradoxes especially when dissected scientifically
Thank you so much Sabine for your channel. .
I'm no genius, (maybe) but your clear, memorable explanation of very difficult concepts has enriched my intellectual mind and helped me understand
"the big picture" a little better.
Thanks again. I'm here every Saturday.
P.S. I also love the satirical quips.
AMAZING!! Thank you.
That was really interesting, I couldn't think about the last two levels of nothing before your explanation, thanks a lot!
GOGOO 🤣
The answer to the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" that I like best is that we don't know if a state of "nothing" is even possible. It may be possible, but we have no evidence that such a state ever "existed" at any time in the past.
I don't think it could have. Just by the fact that there is something now it means that there was never a nothing because there was a future of something implying that that nothing was still something.
If 'nothing' is unmeasurable (and does not interact with anything we can measure) then finding evidence for it might be impossible.
@@alistairgrey5089 Having a "future" implies that time has always existed.
@@c_b5060 that's basically what I said. The existence of existence implies that true nothing never existed.
Thank you! Very playful and also challenging. I thought nothing ended with Virtual Paritcles. This is why I'm a computer expert and not a philosopher!
"Why is there something rather than nothing" is very easy to answer actually. If it would be just "nothing" then there would not be anyone to ask those questions.
I love this lady. Esp her sly little jokes given straight faced.
Exactly
I find myself softly chuckling ever so often when I listen. Makes my day better.
"Nothing can become from Nothing"
Ancient Greek quote.
Everything (something) is dual to nothing.
Being is dual to non-being becoming creates becoming -- Plato's cat.
Thesis is dual to anti-thesis creates the converging thesis or synthesis (emergence) -- the time independent Hegelian dialectic or Hegel's cat.
Alive is dual to not alive -- the Schrodinger's cat superposition.
Particles are dual to anti-particles, spin up is dual to spin down -- the Dirac equation.
Schrodinger's cat is based upon Hegel's or Fichte's cat and they stole it from Plato.
Duality creates reality.
The big bang is an infinite negative curvature singularity and Gaussian negative curvature is defined with two dual points -- Janus holes/points:-
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_curvature
Points are dual to lines -- the principle of duality in geometry -- non null homotopic.
"Always two there are" -- Yoda.
Synthesis or emergence is created by duality = Janus points.
Nothing comes from nothing. Nothing ever could.
@@hyperduality2838 the duality is straight things and curved things. Reality is that matter is not in motion, matter is motion itself. It is the action in the equation 0÷1=0, being the division symbol. Motion is the division of something and nothing. The motion is charge/energy. It is straight, it curves away to avoid conglomeration, as it isn't a thing that can conglomerate. Motion can only...move.
Charge/energy which is just motion itself curves into spheres where it would conglomerate. In omnidirectional polar volume of motion this curves leads to spheres with spin barriers. These are the units of matter.
This reduction of motion, the curve is gravity. Motion is charge, gravity is the opposite of motion, the curve. But since motion does not conglomerate, it moves, gravity acts then as a battery of motion, or like a coil.
It all just motion, metaphysical "had to be" motion because existence cannot not exist, as nothing is impossible.
There is only two. Straight things, and curved things. Draw or make or imagine anything with neither.
Yes, they mathematically defind zero, they found how it can obey the rule of value to validate its obvious existence, and in so doing they inadvertently defined the real big bang mathematically as well.
@@hyperduality2838 duality is Scientology and Kabbalah...
Unity is Godlike system.
Nothing can become from NOTHING.
Otherwise is called "something".
The quarks' core is trinity and cannot be divided which called "atom" aka uncut.
Quarks is the basic matter and its energy which means that matter is energy and Plato tried to define this principle with "The world of ideas" which is not the negative of our world but its the basis...which means our world is the extension of energy.
The more you dig backwards the thinner the energy becomes which eventually you end up in light which leads to the so called big bang and gass spinning darkness...
The biggest problem is what caused the first cause of the creation of the universe since the matter its actually ancient light ...
Because the cause of the first cause has to be outside of time and space...and this is what we call ...God!
It is the tension between nothing and anti-nothing that makes this all possible.
Lol - did you mean "dark nothing"
@@paulneelon8343 No. Just negative nothing.
@@junfour If you call two down-nothings and one up-nothing a thing... Yes.
@@PlanetDeLaTourette That sounds to me like a number of things: a pair of down-nothings and an up-nothing and the set which they form as well as everything which isn't identical to that set nor any of its members. This seems like something is coming out of nothing...
"Today, I will be talking about nothing"
*video ends*
I came into this world with nothing and I still have most of it left.
You've been very frugal
5:48 - That joke was totally worth it.
Except that she, like most people, got the quote wrong. It should be: "The love of money is the root of all evil."
5:50 lmao🤣
When I learned about the Big Bang as a kid, I tried to understand HOW the universe could "begin" and WHY it existed. When I tried really hard to imaging what it would be like if the universe just didn't exist, I couldn't imagine true nothingness, total non-existence. I concluded (if that's the right word) that it just wasn't possible for truly "nothing" to exist, and so logically the universe simple had to exist because it couldn't not exist. Somehow, that convinced me at the time.
Maybe you were onto something. Maybe _something_ is necessary.
@@LukeSumIpsePatremTe Or maybe, just maybe, your 3D human mind and perspective, you will never be able to comprehend.
Surely this has been pointed out below time and time again. But my favorite answer was found in another video, where the university professor told the student: "even if there WERE nothing ---- you still wouldn't be happy".
Anthropomorphic principle: if there were nothing, we couldn't ask why there's something rather than nothing.
Loved this video! Your dedication to the birthday present is wonderful!
Is this not just a restatement of the fact that there is, in fact, something rather than nothing? It still does not give any explanation as to how it came about that something exists.
@@lucnotenboom8370 it's the answer to why, not how.
@@codyheiner3636 it is not, and I'll show you. If it were the 'why' of why we exist, then I would not be able to ask the following question: why are we there to ask why there's something rather than nothing?
The fact that we are there to ask why is proof that something exists. But why are we there to ask why? That is still unexplained.
@@lucnotenboom8370 Because complex life only took about 4 billion years to evolve on this planet.
@@skylark8828 and why was there an earth to evolve on in the first place? And then why did the matter which constitutes the earth in the first place? And why did the subatomic particles which constitute that matter exist in the first place? Etc. You can go on and on, but there won't actually be an answer at the end.
This video should have included a clip of Brad Pitt's "what's in the box??"
Or something about a cat...
Whoa whoa, too soon…
Gwen’s head which actually contains nothing.
@@a.hardin620 haha good point
🤣🤣🤣🤣
(5:50) Time does not exist (nor can it exist) in a vacuum of absolute nothingness. If the vacuum is completely empty, there's nothing to demonstrate the effects of time. Some form of existence must be present before time can be made manifest.
I like this argument a lot, but from time's "observer" it seems to me that the non-existing contents of the box have the properties
of being absolute, perfect members of their species of thing: vacuum of absolute nothingness, unchanging for long enough
to say they _have_ existed, even if we must destroy the vacuum to prove our point by allowing "something" into the box
in order to observe it.
Or I could ask: don't we through creating this state and making it "unchanging" long enough to say it is absolute, then isn't
the property of the absence of change a salient which obliges us to say : "This box has contained nothing for duration _H_"
until we open it? It seems to me time will rear its ugly head then mention we refer to the box and know these are the
conditions inside the box.
@@cemacmillan **"it seems to me that the non-existing contents of the box have the properties ..."*
.. If the contents of the box are nonexistent, then they have no properties.
*""This box has contained nothing for duration _H_""*
... Within this vacuum of absolute nonexistence, what frame of reference are you using to assess how long (time) the nonexistent contents have been nonexistent? How are you measuring the length of time when there is no change taking place?
*"It seems to me time will rear its ugly head then mention we refer to the box and know these are the conditions inside the box."*
... There are no "conditions" present in a box that is totally void of anything and everything. The moment a condition enters the box, the box is no longer empty.
*Conclusion:* A state of absolute nothingness (Nonexistence) is incomprehensible. Comprehensibility requires the existence of "something" in order to comprehend it.
Wonderful video! My own theory is that nothing and everything exist simultaneously in a universe/void that in effect toggles constantly on an infinitismal scale. There is nothing, there is something, all at the same time.
Great video! I would flip (or leave the possibility of a flip) between levels 7 & 8. I reckon Aristotle would be happier with that order. (Flipping 7 & 9 might be possible too but that's a little trickier)
"9 levels of nothing" is how much science is understood by flat earthers.
Flat Earthers are living proof that you don't need to know that much.
Only one level of nothing is needed: no connection to reality
literally no reason for this comment
The flat Earth is actually a modern idea. There is not a shred of evidence anywhere in the historical record that any people of the past thought the Earth was flat. The oldest written documents ever found still refer to the Earth as an orb or a globe.
I wonder whether flat earthers and various conspiracy theories (eg "fake" moon landing, etc) are deliberately spread falsehoods whose purpose is to make people reject _all_ conspiracy theories, including the ones that are actually true.
I mean, they can't _all_ be wrong, even if the majority of them are.