Nothingness

I have for a while wondered at the state of the atom. Most of it is nothing – just space outside the nucleus, in which electrons spin. What is nothing? Surely 70% of everything (the region outside the nucleus) cannot be nothing: how can you even imagine nothingness? How can it exist? What does it look like?

A bit of research later and it turns out physicists think it is composed of Dark Energy: where gravity becomes so weak that everything moves so fast it loses its’ matter and becomes something else: a wave, radiation, that sort of thing.

It is difficult to say what energy is, but it is not solid, gas, or liquid. It is matter in motion, a description of that movement. We can see it’s tracks through Brownian motion, and through Quantum Physics, measure its position or its momentum, but not both. It is clearly very mysterious.

It seems that if an object is not moving, it can still have energy, if it is spinning or generating something within itself. E=mc2 dictates that matter and energy can change from one to the other. So matter can be energy and energy matter; two distinct ways of measuring the same thing. However it cannot work with areas as small as atoms and the particles they make up. Are they so small, they are indistinguishable? As far as a particle physicist is concerned, particles don’t have masses; they have equivalent energies. In effect they are constantly moving.

This means that in your body, in the smallest way of looking at it, most of it is composed of electrons bouncing into one another, changing states, for example causing free radicals. At a cellular level, though it is far less random and sporadic. In larger scales, where we can observe things more clearly, it seems more stable, proteins constructed, and chemicals passing through channels. It seems that the madness of quantum mechanics does not apply at all, so where and why does it disappear? And does Dark Energy have any bearing on it and our bodies?

Radiation must pass through us all the time, photons of light, but possibly not Dark Energy. DNA however is repaired quickly enough that small doses of radiation do not harm us; it is only in a nuclear explosion that the radiation is large enough or in high levels of UV that we are damaged.

Certainly if there is Dark Energy in the body, it would let radiation in or harm us from its negative pressure. Is it just outer space, where gravity is at its least that possesses Dark Energy?

If there is Dark Energy; and no such thing as nothing, when we examine things closely, it would seem to simply to be waves of electrons moving from place to place, shifting in and out of their shells and between molecules as they form. Thinking about it, it seems to me that electrons move so fast it is as though they are in all places at all times, filling up all the space outside the nucleus. This is why IMO they can be considered to be both particles and waves at the same time. It can however be thought of that electrons cannot literally be everywhere at once, even as waves, for Planck’s constant says they can only occupy certain energy levels. This means that there is something blank, a space where nothing exists, between the circling levels of electrons. I cannot imagine this, but maybe it is just invisible to us, like air; even when viewed through a very powerful microscope.

Aristotle himself thought that a void, a vacuum – a nothingness – could not exist because something would flow in to fill it, like water into a hole; and that if such a vacuum did exist, the water would constantly fill it - into infinity, which to me seems impossible.

So Dark Energy – matter that is moving so fast it is described as energy – fills the space where nothing else exists. Black holes however can be thought of as vacuums and have infinite densities, pulling everything in, so perhaps Aristotle was wrong. He did live a long time ago. Similarly, thinking about the Big Bang, where there was nothing beforehand: could this have been comprised of merely pure Energy: therefore creating everything from nothing.

Many philosophers have thought about this. From reading it, I have come up with an idea:

'If there is nothing there, and nobody to say that nothing was there, there would theoretically be nothing.’

I’m not sure if this proves anything, but its an idea. Which may also be something and nothing.