How Nothing Could Destroy the Universe

 

Copyright: Sanjay Basu

Nothing has always been more dangerous than it sounds.

For most of daily life, nothing is a complaint, not a concept. You open the fridge. You sigh. There is nothing to eat. This sort of nothing is negotiable. It depends on hunger, expectations, and how brave you feel about expired yogurt. Physics is not interested in that kind of emptiness.

Physics worries about stricter kinds of nothing.

There is the modest version, what philosophers might call nothing with a lowercase n. You start with something and remove it piece by piece. Matter goes. Air follows. Radiation fades. What remains is a vacuum. Sparse. Cold. Seemingly empty. But still something.

Then there is Nothing, capital N. Absolute absence. No space. No time. No fields. No laws waiting quietly in the wings. Not emptiness, but non-being. It is hard to imagine because imagination itself requires a stage. If true Nothing exists, it cannot be part of the universe. It cannot interact with it. It cannot even sit beside it. Everything that exists must be completely disconnected from it.

The distinction matters more than philosophers often admit. Capital-N Nothing is not merely a room with the furniture removed. It is the absence of the room, the walls, the dimensions the room would occupy, and the very possibility of occupancy. Lowercase-n nothing, the vacuum, is more like a room with invisible furniture. The chairs are there. You just cannot see them until you try to sit down.

Physicists, being practical creatures, mostly ignore that version. We study the lesser nothing. And that lesser nothing has caused more trouble than any substance ever has.

The Ancient Fear of the Void

In the fifth century BC, Leucippus and Democritus proposed that matter was made of indivisible atoms moving through a void. This void was not a metaphor. It was literal nothingness between things. Aristotle hated this idea. For him, nature abhorred a vacuum. Matter was continuous. Space was full. Change was smooth. His universe was a set of nested spheres, ordered and purposeful, driven ultimately by a prime mover beyond matter itself.

The atomists had sound intuitions, even if their methods were speculative. Their atoms were not quite atoms as we understand them. Those came twenty-three centuries later. Those ancient Greek principles held.

Stuff is grainy. Gaps exist between the grains. The void is real.

Aristotle offered a clever rebuttal. If the void existed, he argued, objects would move through it without resistance. Motion would be instantaneous. Since instantaneous motion is absurd, the void must not exist. The logic was elegant, even if the physics was wrong. Nature, Aristotle insisted, fills every corner.

The argument was not just scientific. It was theological. Aristotle’s cosmos had room for God. The atomists’ void did not. Over centuries, this mattered more than experimental evidence. To accept the void was to flirt with godlessness. In medieval Europe, the vacuum became suspect. Zero became suspicious. Emptiness smelled of heresy.

The medieval church took Aristotle seriously. Perhaps too seriously. In 1277, the Bishop of Paris condemned 219 philosophical propositions, including some that denied God’s power to create a vacuum. The condemnation was meant to protect divine omnipotence. If God wished to make emptiness, who were philosophers to say He could not? The irony was rich. A religious decree cracked open the door that centuries of philosophy had kept shut.

Elsewhere, the story unfolded differently. In many Eastern philosophies, emptiness was not feared but examined. Śūnyatā was not mere absence but insight. With nothing placed at the center of thought, zero emerged naturally as a number. In the West, zero arrived later and under protest. Florence banned it in the thirteenth century, worried that nothing could be used to fake something in the ledgers. Accountants eventually rehabilitated it. Double-entry bookkeeping made peace with nothing long before philosophers did.

The story of zero’s resistance is more colorful than textbooks suggest. The Hindu mathematicians who formalized zero around the seventh century understood something their Western counterparts resisted. Nothing could be counted. Nothing could be calculated. In 628 CE, the mathematician Brahmagupta laid down rules for arithmetic with zero that we still use today. Subtract a number from itself and you get zero. Add zero to anything and it remains unchanged. The rules seem obvious now. They were revolutionary then.

When Arabic scholars translated Indian texts in Baghdad’s House of Wisdom, they inherited the zero along with the decimal system. Al-Khwarizmi’s treatises spread these ideas westward. But Europe hesitated. Arabic numerals carried the taint of the infidel. Florence’s 1299 ban on “the infidel symbols” was partly about fraud prevention, adding zeros to inflate numbers, but also about cultural anxiety. The University of Padua held out until 1348, insisting that book prices use “plain” Roman numerals, not ciphers.

By the seventeenth century, theology loosened its grip. Torricelli and Pascal created vacuums with mercury columns. For the first time, emptiness could be manufactured. But even then, the question lingered. Was this really nothing?

Evangelista Torricelli’s 1643 experiment was simple in design, profound in consequence. He filled a glass tube with mercury, inverted it into a dish of the same metal, and watched the column fall. It stopped at about 76 centimeters. Above the mercury, in the closed end of the tube, sat a space with nothing in it. Or so he claimed.

“We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of the element air,” Torricelli wrote to his colleague Michelangelo Ricci, “which by unquestioned experiments is known to have weight.” The phrase is beautiful. We are fish at the bottom of an atmospheric sea. The pressure of that sea holds the mercury up. The space above is empty.

Pascal pushed further. If air has weight, he reasoned, there should be less of it at higher altitudes. He asked his brother-in-law Florin Périer to haul a barometer up the Puy-de-Dôme in central France. At the summit, the mercury stood lower. The ocean of air was shallower there. The vacuum was real, manufacturable, measurable. Aristotle had been wrong.

The Quantum Complication

Quantum mechanics answered no.

The vacuum is restless. It seethes. You cannot pin a particle down without disturbing it. The same uncertainty infects empty space. Virtual particles flicker in and out. Fields fluctuate. The vacuum has energy. Enough energy to curve space and time.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle guarantees this restlessness. Energy and time are conjugate variables. The more precisely you measure one, the less precisely you can know the other. Over sufficiently short timescales, energy becomes blurry. Particles can borrow existence from nothing, as long as they pay it back quickly. The vacuum is full of these ephemeral debts.

This is not mere theory. The Casimir effect proves it. In 1948, the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir predicted that two uncharged metal plates, placed very close together in a vacuum, would attract each other. The reason is strange. Virtual photons outside the plates have more room to fluctuate than those between them. Fewer modes fit in the gap. This imbalance creates pressure. The plates squeeze together.

Steven Lamoreaux measured this force in 1996. His results matched theory within experimental error. The vacuum pushes back. Nothing exerts force.

That fact may explain one of the great mysteries of modern cosmology. Observations suggest the universe is not just expanding but accelerating. Something is pushing it apart. We call it dark energy. The most conservative explanation is also the strangest. Dark energy may simply be the energy of empty space itself. The void pushing outward, faster and faster, as the universe grows emptier.

The numbers, however, refuse to cooperate. When physicists calculate how much energy the vacuum should contain, they get an answer roughly 120 orders of magnitude larger than what astronomers observe. This is not a small discrepancy. It is the worst prediction in the history of science. Some physicists call it embarrassing. Others call it a crisis. All agree it remains unsolved.

The cosmological constant problem, as it is known, has resisted decades of brilliant attack. Supersymmetry helps a little. It can reduce the discrepancy to a mere 60 orders of magnitude. But this is like saying a forest fire has been contained to half a continent. Something fundamental is missing from our understanding.

So if the vacuum is not nothing, where is nothing?

Bubbles of Nothing

In the early 1980s, Edward Witten uncovered an unsettling answer. Within certain theories of gravity, spacetime itself can be unstable. A bubble can form. Inside that bubble, there is not empty space but no space at all. No geometry. No extension. Nothing does not sit there. It replaces there.

Witten was studying Kaluza-Klein theory, which posits extra dimensions curled up too small to observe. What he found was that these compact dimensions could shrink to nothing. Quantum jitters would inevitably jostle the extra dimension, sometimes pinching it closed. When the circle collapses to a point, it takes spacetime with it. The instability nucleates a bubble with no interior. Only a mirrorlike surface marking where existence ends.

If such a bubble appeared in your living room, it would not leave a hole. It would erase the idea of a hole. Furniture would vanish. Air would vanish. Space would vanish. The bubble would expand at near light speed, consuming spacetime itself. The universe would not end with a bang or a crunch. It would simply stop being.

The physics is eerily clean. In Witten’s original 1982 paper, the bubble emerges as a gravitational instanton. A solution to the equations that describes tunneling between configurations. The universe could quantum-mechanically tunnel from existence into nonexistence. The probability is low. Cosmologically, fantastically, preposterously low. But it is not zero.

This discovery forced physicists to confront nothing seriously. In 2011, Adam Brown and Alex Dahlen reframed the problem in a surprising way. They showed that this bubble of nothing could be understood as a peculiar limit of spacetime rather than an alien intruder. Consider a vacuum with negative energy. Such a vacuum curves spacetime inward. Push that curvature more and more negative, and the spacetime collapses faster and more violently. In the limit of infinite negative curvature, the geometry disappears entirely. Nothing emerges not as an absence, but as an extreme.

This reframing matters. If nothing is merely an endpoint on a continuum. If you can dial spacetime all the way to zero. Then it belongs in the same mathematical framework as everything else. The bubble of nothing becomes a cousin of black holes, wormholes, and other exotic geometries. Strange, perhaps. But not supernatural.

This picture gains strength from the holographic principle. The idea is simple to state and difficult to accept. A volume of space can be fully described by information living on its boundary. Like a hologram, the three-dimensional world may be encoded on a lower-dimensional surface. Two languages describe the same physics. One speaks in volumes and fields. The other speaks in boundaries and states.

Juan Maldacena’s 1997 conjecture made this concrete. He showed that string theory in a negatively curved anti-de Sitter space is equivalent to a conformal field theory living on its boundary. The bulk and the boundary are not two descriptions of similar physics. They are the same physics, written in different alphabets. Gravity in the interior emerges from quantum mechanics on the edge.

Crucially, the size of the boundary language depends on the curvature of the bulk. As curvature becomes more negative, the boundary theory loses degrees of freedom. Push to negative infinity, and the language collapses. No words remain. No description survives. Nothing.

The holographic principle suggests something profound about the nature of nothing. If spacetime is encoded on a boundary, and the boundary theory runs out of degrees of freedom, then nothing is not a mysterious absence. It is a mathematical silence. The system has nothing left to say.

This is not just philosophical play. It carries consequences. If nothing is a legitimate phase of quantum gravity, then it belongs in the landscape of consistent theories. And if all such theories are connected, as recent arguments suggest, then nothing is not isolated. It is reachable. Transitionable. Part of the same story.

In this view, nothing is not a forbidden void beyond reality. It is a neighbor. Quiet. Patient. Mathematically allowed.

The Landscape of Endings

String theorists speak of a landscape. Not mountains and valleys in the ordinary sense, but a vast terrain of possible vacuum states. Each point represents a different way the universe could be configured. Different values for fundamental constants, different arrangements of extra dimensions, different amounts of vacuum energy. The landscape may contain 10⁵⁰⁰ distinct valleys, each a potential home for physics as we know it.

We appear to live in one such valley. The vacuum energy is small but positive. The extra dimensions, if they exist, are stable enough to persist. The laws of physics permit stars and chemistry and eventually physicists. But our valley is not the deepest. It may not even be particularly deep. We could be perched on a ledge, separated from true stability by a quantum-mechanical barrier.

This is the false vacuum scenario. Our universe might be stuck in a local minimum, not a global one. Somewhere, deeper vacua exist. If the universe found a path to reach them. Through quantum tunneling, through thermal fluctuation, through some process we have not yet imagined, it would transition. The transition would propagate outward at nearly the speed of light, rewriting the laws of physics as it went. Matter as we know it would cease to exist. Not because it was destroyed, but because the rules that allowed it would no longer apply.

The bubble of nothing is a special case of this more general instability. It represents the ultimate transition. Not to a different vacuum, but to no vacuum at all. The landscape ends. The terrain vanishes. There is nowhere left to be.

Living on Borrowed Time

Does that mean the universe will end this way?

Possibly. There is no evidence that a bubble of nothing is forming nearby. There is also no law that forbids it. The universe may be metastable, like a pencil balanced on its tip. It can persist for unimaginably long times. But permanence is not guaranteed.

Recent calculations have only sharpened the concern. Isabel Garcia Garcia, Patrick Draper, and Benjamin Lillard have studied what happens when the extra dimensions are stabilized, a necessary feature of any realistic string theory model. Their findings are mixed. Some stabilization mechanisms prevent the bubble. Others do not. The outcome depends on parameters we cannot yet measure.

If the compact dimensions are large enough, the vacuum can survive for billions of years. Perhaps longer than the current age of the universe. Perhaps long enough for every star to burn out, every black hole to evaporate, every structure to dissolve into cold radiation. The bubble might come only after the universe has already died of other causes.

Or it might come tomorrow. That is the unsettling part. A bubble of nothing expanding at the speed of light gives no warning. By the time you could detect it, you would already be inside it. Already be nothing.

The deeper lesson is not apocalyptic. It is humbling.

Nothing is not the absence of physics. It is something physics must reckon with. It shaped ancient debates, delayed mathematical progress, powers the expansion of the cosmos, and lurks as a possible endpoint of spacetime itself. It has been feared, banned, worshipped, and misunderstood.

The history of nothing is really the history of our expanding ambition. First we named it. Then we counted it. Then we manufactured it in glass tubes. Now we write equations for it. Each step felt complete at the time. Each step led somewhere stranger.

Should we worry?

Probably not. If nothing comes for the universe, there will be no warning, no suffering, no aftermath. No one will be around to complain.

Which is, in a way, exactly what nothing does best.

Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas! צ’אג סמאך Heri za Kwanzaa! .أتمنى لكم السلام والازدهار. दीपावली की शुभकामनाएँ and Happy New Year!

For my kind — Happy Epicurean–Cārvāka Day. May your life be full of ethical pleasure and free of superstition!