The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe Paperback – August 13, 2002
by John D. Barrow (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars 40 ratings
What conceptual blind spot kept the ancient Greeks (unlike the Indians and Maya) from developing a concept of zero? Why did St. Augustine equate nothingness with the Devil? What tortuous means did 17th-century scientists employ in their attempts to create a vacuum? And why do contemporary quantum physicists believe that the void is actually seething with subatomic activity? You’ll find the answers in this dizzyingly erudite and elegantly explained book by the English cosmologist John D. Barrow.
Ranging through mathematics, theology, philosophy, literature, particle physics, and cosmology, The Book of Nothing explores the enduring hold that vacuity has exercised on the human imagination. Combining high-wire speculation with a wealth of reference that takes in Freddy Mercury and Shakespeare alongside Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking, the result is a fascinating excursion to the vanishing point of our knowledge.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Entertaining and informative... I am happy to report that nothing is full of interesting reading.” --New Scientist
“Convincing...authoritative . . . tells the story persuasively.” --Nature
“Barrow’s efforts to relate scientific developments to wider cultural themes must be applauded.” --Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Stuffed with wonderful stories. . . . [A] feast of clear thinking and fine writing.” —BookPage
From the Inside Flap
What conceptual blind spot kept the ancient Greeks (unlike the Indians and Maya) from developing a concept of zero? Why did St. Augustine equate nothingness with the Devil? What tortuous means did 17th-century scientists employ in their attempts to create a vacuum? And why do contemporary quantum physicists believe that the void is actually seething with subatomic activity? You?ll find the answers in this dizzyingly erudite and elegantly explained book by the English cosmologist John D. Barrow.
Ranging through mathematics, theology, philosophy, literature, particle physics, and cosmology, The Book of Nothing explores the enduring hold that vacuity has exercised on the human imagination. Combining high-wire speculation with a wealth of reference that takes in Freddy Mercury and Shakespeare alongside Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking, the result is a fascinating excursion to the vanishing point of our knowledge.
From the Back Cover
What conceptual blind spot kept the ancient Greeks (unlike the Indians and Maya) from developing a concept of zero? Why did St. Augustine equate nothingness with the Devil? What tortuous means did 17th-century scientists employ in their attempts to create a vacuum? And why do contemporary quantum physicists believe that the void is actually seething with subatomic activity? You'll find the answers in this dizzyingly erudite and elegantly explained book by the English cosmologist John D. Barrow.
Ranging through mathematics, theology, philosophy, literature, particle physics, and cosmology, The Book of Nothing explores the enduring hold that vacuity has exercised on the human imagination. Combining high-wire speculation with a wealth of reference that takes in Freddy Mercury and Shakespeare alongside Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking, the result is a fascinating excursion to the vanishing point of our knowledge.
About the Author
John D. Barrow is research professor of mathematical sciences in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University. His previous books include Theories of Everything, The Artful Universe, Impossibility, Between Inner and Outer Space, The Universe That Discovered Itself, and The Origin of the Universe. He lives in England.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Nothingology —
Flying to Nowhere
'Nothing', it has been said, 'is an awe-inspiring yet essentially undigested concept, highly esteemed by writers of a mystical or existentialist tendency, but by most others regarded with anxiety, nausea, and panic.'Nobody seems to know how to handle it and perplexingly diverse conceptions of it exist in different subjects.Just take a look at the entry for 'nothing' in any good dictionary and you will find a host of perplexing synonyms: nil, none, nowt, nulliform, nullity — there is a nothing for every occasion. There are noughts of all sorts to zero-in on, from zero points to zero hours, ciphers to nulliverses.There are concepts that are vacuous, places that are evacuated, and voids of all shapes and sizes. On the more human side, there are nihilists, nihilianists, nihilarians, nihilagents, nothingarians, nullifideans, nullibists,nonentities and nobodies. Every walk of life seems to have its own personification of nothing. Even the financial pages of my newspaper tell me that 'zeros'are an increasingly attractive source of income.
Some zeros seem positively obscure, almost circumlocutory. Tennis can't bring itself to use so blunt a thing as the word 'nil' or 'nothing' or 'zero' to record no score. Instead, it retains the antique term 'love', which has reached us rather unromantically from l'oeuf, the French for an egg which represented the round 0 shape of the zero symbol.Likewise, we still find the use of the term 'love' meaning 'nothing' as when saying you are playing for love (rather than money), hence the distinction of being a true 'amateur', or the statement that one would not do something 'for love or money', by which we mean that we could not do it under any circumstances. Other games have evolved anglicised versions of this anyone-for-tennis pseudonym for zero: 'goose egg' is used by American ten-pin bowlers to signal a frame with no pin knocked down. In England there is a clear tradition for different sports to stick with their own measure of no score, 'nil' in soccer, 'nought' in cricket, but 'ow' in athletics timings, just like a telephone number, or even James Bond's serial number. But sit down at your typewriter and 0 isn't O any more.
'Zilch' became a common expression for zero during the Second World War and infiltrated 'English' English by the channel of US military personnel stationed in Britain. Its original slang application was to anyone whose name was not known. Another similar alliterative alternative was 'zip'. A popular comic strip portrays an owl lecturing to an alligator and an infant rabbit on a new type of mathematics, called 'Aftermath', in which zero is the only number permitted; all problems have the same solution — zero — and consequently the discipline consists of discovering new problems with that inevitable answer.
Another curiosity of language is the use of the term 'cipher' to describe someone who is a nonentity ('a cipher in his own household', as an ineffectual husband and father was once described). Although a cipher is now used to describe a code or encryption involving symbols, it was originally the zero symbol of arithmetic. Here is an amusing puzzle which plays on the double meaning of cipher as a code and a zero:
"U 0 a 0, but I 0 thee
O 0 no 0, but O 0 me.
O let not my 0 a mere 0 go,
But 0 my 0 I 0 thee so."
which deciphers to read
"You sigh for a cipher, but I sigh for thee
O sigh for no cipher, but O sigh for me.
O let not my sigh for a mere cipher go,
But sigh for my sigh, for I sigh for thee so."
The source of the insulting usage of cipher is simple: the zero symbol of arithmetic is one which has no effect when added or subtracted to anything. One Americanisation of this is characteristically racier and derives from modern technical jargon. A null operation is technospeak for an action that has no consequence. Your computer cycles through millions of them while it sits waiting for you to make the next keystroke. It is a neutral internal computer operation that performs no calculation or data manipulation. Correspondingly, to say that someone 'is a zero, a real null op' needs no further elucidation. Of course, with the coming of negative numbers new jokes are possible, like that of the individual whose personality was so negative that when he walked into a party, the guests would look around and ask each other 'who left?' or the scientist whose return to the country was said to have added to the brain drain. The adjective 'napoo', meaning finished or empty, is a contraction of the French il n'y a plus, for 'there is nothing left'.
Not all nominal associations with 'nothing' were derogatory. Sometimes they had a special purpose. When some of the French Huguenots fled to Scotland to escape persecution by Louis XIV they sought to keep their names secret by using the surname Nimmo, derived from the Latin ne mot, meaning no one or no name.
Our system of writing numbers enables us to build up expressions for numbers of unlimited size simply by adding more and more noughts to the right-hand end of any number: 11230000000000 . . . During the hyperinflationary period of the early 1920s, the German currency collapsed in value so that hundreds of billions of marks were needed to stamp a letter. The economist John K. Galbraith writes of the psychological shock induced by these huge numbers with their strings of zeros:
"'Zero stroke' or 'cipher stroke' is the name created by German physicians for a prevalent nervous malady brought about by the present fantastic currency figures. Scores of cases of the 'stroke' are reported among men and women of all classes, who have been prostrated by their efforts to figure in thousands of millions. Many of these persons apparently are normal, except for a desire to write endless rows of ciphers."
Pockets of hyperinflation persist around the globe; indeed there are more zeros around today than at any other time in history. The introduction of binary arithmetic for computer calculation, together with the profusion of computer codes for the control of just about everything, has filled machines with 0s and 1s. Once you had a ten per cent chance of happening upon a zero, now it's evens. But there are huge numbers that are now almost commonplace. Everyone knows there are billions and billions of stars, and national debts conjure up similar astronomical numbers. Yet we have found a way to hide the zeros: 109 doesn't look as bad as 1,000,000,000.
The sheer number of synonyms for 'nothing' is in itself evidence of the subtlety of the idea that the words try to capture. Greek, Judaeo-Christian, Indian and Oriental traditions all confronted the idea in different ways which produced different historical threads. We will find that the concept of nothingness that developed in each arena merely to fill some sort of gap then took on a life of its own and found itself describing a something that had great importance. The most topical example is the physicists' concept of nothing — the vacuum. It began as empty space — the void, survived Augustine's dilution to 'almost nothing', turned into a stagnant ether through which all the motions in the Universe swam, vanished in Einstein's hands, then re-emerged in the twentieth-century quantum picture of how Nature works. This perspective has revealed that the vacuum is a complex structure that can change its character in sudden or gradual ways. Those changes can have cosmic effects and may well have been responsible for endowing the Universe with many of its characteristic features. They may have made life a possibility in the Universe and one day they may bring it to an end.
When we read of the difficulties that the ancients had in coming to terms with the concept of nothing, or the numeral for zero, it is difficult to put oneself in their shoes. The idea now seems commonplace. But mathematicians and philosophers had to undergo an extraordinary feat of mental gymnastics to accommodate this everyday notion. Artists took rather longer to explore the concepts of Nothing that emerged. But, in modern times, it is the artist who continues to explore the paradoxes of Nothing in ways that are calculated to shock, surprise or amuse.
Nothing Ventured
In the 1950s artists began to explore the limiting process of going from polychrome to monochrome to nullichrome. The American abstract artist Ad Reinhardt produced canvases coloured entirely red or blue, before graduating to a series of five-foot square all-black productions that toured the leading galleries in America, London and Paris in 1963. Not surprisingly, some critics condemned him as a charlatan but others admired his art noir: 'an ultimate statement of esthetic purity', according to American art commentator Hilton Kramer.Reinhardt went on to run separate exhibitions of his all-red, all-blue and all-black canvases and writes extensively about the raison d'être for his work.It is a challenge to purists to decide whether Reinhardt's all-black canvases capture the representation of Nothing more completely than the all-white canvases of Robert Rauschenberg. Personally, I prefer the spectacular splash of colours in Jasper Johns' The Number Zero.
The visual zero did not need to be explicitly represented by paint or obliquely signalled by its absence. The artists of the Renaissance discovered the visual zero for themselves in the fifteenth century and it became the centrepiece of a new representation of the world that allowed an infinite number of manifestations. The 'vanishing point' is a device to create a realistic picture of a three-dimensional scene on a flat surface. The painter fools the eye of the viewer by imagining lines which connect the objects being represented to the viewer's eye. The canvas is just a screen that intervenes between the real scene and the eye. Where the imaginary lines intersect that screen, the artist places his marks. Lines running parallel to the screen are represented by parallel lines which recede to the line of the distant horizon, but those seen as perpendicular to the screen are represented by a cone of lines that converge towards a single point — the vanishing point — which creates the perspective of the spectator.
Musicians have also followed the piper down the road to nothingtown. John Cage's musical composition 4¢ 33? — enthusiastically encored in some halls — consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of unbroken silence, rendered by a skilled pianist wearing evening dress and seated motionless on the piano stool in front of an operational Steinway. Cage explains that his idea is to create the musical analogue of absolute zero of temperature24 where all thermal motion stops. A nice idea, but would you pay anything other than nothing to see it? Martin Gardner tells us that 'I have not heard 4¢ 33? performed but friends who have tell me that it is Cage's finest composition'.
Writers have embraced the theme with equal enthusiasm. Elbert Hubbard's elegantly bound Essay on Silence contains only blank pages, as does a chapter in the autobiography of the English footballer Len Shackleton which bears the title 'What the average director knows about football'. An empty volume, entitled The Nothing Book, was published in 1974 and appeared in several editions and even withstood a breach of copyright action by the author of another book of blank pages.
Another style of writing uses Nothing as a fulcrum around which to spin opposites that cancel. Gogol's Dead Souls begins with a description of a gentleman with no characteristics arriving at a town known only as N.:
"The gentleman in their carriage was not handsome but neither was he particularly bad-looking; he was neither too fat nor too thin; he could not be said to be too old, but he was not too young either."
A classic example of this adversarial descriptive style, in which attributes and counter-attributes cancel out to zero, is to be found on a woman's tomb in Northumberland. The family inscribed the words
"She was temperate, chaste, and charitable, but she was proud, peevish, and passionate. She was an affectionate wife and tender mother but her husband and child seldom saw her countenance without a disgusting frown . . ."
Not to be forgotten, of course, are those commercial geniuses who are able to make more out of nothing than most of us can earn from anything. 'Polo, the mint with the hole' is one of the best-known British advertising pitches for a sweet that evolved independently as a 'Lifesaver' in the United States. More than forty years of successful marketing have promoted the hole in the mint rather than the mint itself. Nobody seems to notice that they are buying a toroidal confection that contains a good chunk of empty space, but then he wouldn't.
Nothing Gained
So much for these snippets of nothing. They show us nothing more than that there is a considerable depth and breadth to the contemplation of Nothing. In the chapters to come, we shall explore some of these unexpected paths. We shall see that, far from being a quirky sideshow, Nothing is never far from the central plots in the history of ideas. In every field we shall explore, we shall find that there is a central issue which involves a right conception of Nothing, and an appropriate representation of it. Philosophical overviews of key ideas in the history of human thought have always made much of concepts like infinity,but little of Nothing. Theology was greatly entwined with the complexities of Nothing, to decide whether we were created out of it and whether we risked heading back into its Godless oblivion. Religious practices could readily make contact with the reality of Nothingness through death. Death as personal annihilation is an ancient and available variety of Nothing, with traditional functions in artistic representation. It is a terminus, a distancing, suggesting an ultimate perspective or perhaps a last judgement; and its cold reality can be used to spook the complacent acceptance of a here-and-now to which listeners are inevitably committed.
One of our aims is to right this neglect of nothing and show a little of the curious way in which Nothing in all its guises has proved to be a key concept in many human inquiries, whose right conception has opened up new ways of thinking about the world. We will begin our nullophilia by investigating the history of the concept and symbol for the mathematicians' zero. Here, nothing turns out to be quite as one expected. The logic of the Greeks prevents them having the idea at all and it is to the Indian cultures that we must look to find thinkers who are comfortable with the idea that Nothing might be something. Next, we shall follow what happened after the Greeks caught up. Their battle with zero focused upon its manifestation as a physical zero, the zero of empty space, the vacuum and the void. The struggle to make sense of these concepts, to incorporate them into a cosmological framework that impinged upon everyday experiences with real materials, formed the starting point for an argument that would continue unabated, becoming ever more sophisticated, for nearly two thousand years. Medieval science and theology grappled constantly with the idea of the vacuum, trying to decide questions about its physical reality, its logical possibility and its theological desirability.
Part of the problem with zero, as with the complementary concept of infinity, was the way in which it seemed to invite paradox and confusing self-reference. This was why so many careful thinkers had given it such a wide berth. But what was heresy to the logician was a godsend to the writer. Countless authors avoided trouble with Nothing by turning over its paradoxes and puns, again and again, in new guises, to entertain and perplex. Whereas the philosopher might face the brunt of theological criticism for daring to take such a sacrilegious concept seriously, the humorist trying to tell his readers that 'Nothing really matters' could have his cake and eat it, just as easily as Freddie Mercury. If others disapproved of Nothing, then the writer's puns and paradoxes just provided more ammunition to undermine the coherence of Nothing as a sensible concept. But when it came back into fashion amongst serious thinkers, then were not his word games profound explorations of the bottomless philosophical concept that Nothingness presented?
Hand-in-hand with the searches for the meaning of Nothing and the void in the Middle Ages, there grew up a serious experimental philosophy of the vacuum. Playing with words to decide whether or not a vacuum could truly exist was not enough. There was another route to knowledge. See if you could make a vacuum. Gradually, theological disputes about the reality of a vacuum became bound up with a host of simple experiments designed to decide whether or not it was possible to evacuate a region of space completely. This line of inquiry eventually stimulated scientists like Torricelli, Galileo, Pascal and Boyle to use pumps to remove air from glass containers and demonstrate the reality of the pressure and weight of the air above our heads. The vacuum had become part of experimental science. It was also very useful.
Still, physicists doubted whether a true vacuum was possible. The Universe was imagined to contain an ocean of ethereal material through which we moved but upon which we could exert no discernible effect. The science of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries grappled with this elusive fluid and sought to use its imagined presence to explain the newly appreciated natural forces of electricity and magnetism. It would only be banished by Einstein's incisive genius and Albert Michelson's experimental skill. Together they removed the need and the evidence for a cosmic ether. By 1905 a cosmic vacuum had become possible again.
Things soon changed. Einstein's creation of a new and spectacular theory of gravity allowed us to describe a space that is empty of mass and energy with complete mathematical precision. Empty universes could exist.
Yet something had been missed out in the world of the very small. The quantum revolution showed us why the old picture of a vacuum as an empty box was untenable. Henceforth, the vacuum was simply the state that remained when everything that could be removed from the box was removed. That state was by no means empty. It was merely the lowest energy state available. Any small disturbances or attempts to intervene would raise its energy.
Gradually, this exotic new picture of quantum nothingness succumbed to experimental exploration. The multiplication of artificial voids by scientists at the end of the nineteenth century had paved the way for all sorts of useful and now familiar developments in the form of vacuum tubes, light bulbs and X-rays. Now the 'empty' space itself started to be probed. Physicists discovered that their defensive definition of the vacuum as what was left when everything that could be removed had been removed was not as silly as it sounds. There was always something left: a vacuum energy that permeated every fibre of the Universe. This ubiquitous, irremovable vacuum energy was detected and shown to have a tangible physical presence. Only relatively recently has its true importance in the cosmic scheme of things begun to be appreciated. We shall see that the world may possess many different vacuum states. A change from one to another may be possible under certain circumstances, with spectacular results. Remarkably, it appears that such a transition is very difficult to avoid during the first moments of our Universe's expansion. More remarkable still, such a transition could have a host of nice consequences, showing us why the Universe possesses many unusual properties which would otherwise be a complete mystery to us.
Finally, we shall run up against two cosmological mysteries about Nothing. The first is ancient: the problem of creation out of nothing — did the Universe have a beginning? If so, out of what did it emerge? What are the religious origins of such an idea and what is its scientific status today? The second is modern. It draws together all the modern manifestations of the vacuum, the description of gravity and the inevitability of energy in a quantum vacuum. Einstein showed us that the Universe might contain a mysterious form of vacuum energy. Until very recently, astronomical observations could only show that if this energy is present, as an all-pervading cosmic influence, then its intensity must be fantastically small if it is not to come to dominate everything else in the Universe. Physicists have no idea how its influence could remain so small. The obvious conclusion is that it isn't there at all. There must be some simple law of Nature that we have yet to find that restores the vacuum and sets this vacuum energy equal to zero. Alas, such a hope may be forlorn. Last year, two teams of astronomers used Earth's most powerful telescopes together with the incomparable optical power of the Hubble Space Telescope to gather persuasive evidence for the reality of the cosmic vacuum energy. Its effects are dramatic. It is accelerating the expansion of the Universe. And if its presence is real, it will set the future course of the Universe, and determine its end. What better place to begin?
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Product details
ASIN : 0375726098
Publisher : Vintage; Reprint edition (August 13, 2002)
Language : English
Paperback : 384 pages
Customer Reviews:
4.5 out of 5 stars 40 ratings
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Kevin Schroeder
5.0 out of 5 stars Everything about this book is good, except that the final definition of nothing that ...Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2015
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Gave it 5 stars, but I'd really rather give it a 4.9. Everything about this book is good, except that the final definition of nothing that Barrow uses seems to still be something. I fully admit that I may not understand the nothing he is talking about. Francis Shaeffer defines "nothing" as "nothing nothing". As in, "not something". Something without attributes. Barrow seems to define nothing as how Shaeffer defines "nothing something": a nothing that has attributes. But if a nothing has attributes is it not a something?
Again, I may not be understanding it properly, but that is my only contention with the book. The rest of it is completely and utterly fascinating.
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Timothy HaughTop Contributor: Baby
3.0 out of 5 stars Half of a Good BookReviewed in the United States on March 24, 2003
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I was excited to read this book. I find the concepts of zero and the vacuum very interesting and those are the very concepts that are the focus of this book. Unfortunately, it did not quite live up to my expectations.
The first chapters of the book are quite good. Barrow gives us a history lesson on the development of the mathematical concept of zero as well as the historical concept of "nothing" which science will turn into the concept of vacuum. We get to read about the use of zero as a place holder in more complex numbering systems as well as its coming into being as a number. We get to read about the some of the great scientists--Pascal, Newton, Michelson, Einstein--doing experiments and tossing around ideas like the aether. All of this is interesting and well told.
However, about half-way through the wheels start to fall off. Barrow is not nearly as good at explaining the modern concepts of the vacuum as he is about telling of its historical development. Modern physics is again grappling with the question of whether or not a true vacuum can exist. It may be that fluctuations in the vacuum caused the Big Bang and are constantly creating multiple universes, for example. But though Barrow discusses these things, he does not do so in a very coherent manner. Alan Guth, for instance, did a much better job of discussing these same subjects in his book on the inflationary universe theory.
Plus, Barrow is clearly out to toot his own horn a bit in the last couple chapters by mentioning his own contributions to the development of the subject. It just so happens that his contributions don't seem nearly as important as other authors who have written on similar subjects. For those readers interested in the history of zero and the vacuum, I would suggest reading this book through chapter five and then putting it aside.
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Regnal the Caretaker
5.0 out of 5 stars Lambda force rules in Universe � at least for now.Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2002
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John Barrow's work is truly nifty and represents well-researched and designed material, that can stand on it's own.
If you have already read popular science cosmology books by Kip Thorne, Igor Novikov, Martin Rees or Alan Guth (just a few excellent examples - check my reviews), "The Book of Nothing" will still deliver new and fresh angle through which mysteries of quantum and Universe can be looked at. Therefore I recommend this book to all cosmology readers.
Book is unique as a blend of tasteful dissertations from the realms of theology, philosophy, mathematics and cosmo - science. We will discover Mayan culture, Islamic art and Babylonian concept of zero, meet and learn what they thought or discovered - Greek philosophers, Hindus, Leibniz, Galileo, Pascal, Descartes, Newton/Einstein, Godel, Lemaitre, Plank, Guth, Linde, and Penrose/Hawking.
The main theme (regardless if this was cosmology part of the book or not) is vacuum, and more exactly: it's energy.
Vacuum is not empty due to quantum phenomena and vacuum presents itself as a LAMBDA force, dominating, according to what we observe, the current behaviour of visible Universe.
Especially interesting are author's summaries about famous question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?", and about origin of the Universe and life.
Is it possible that Cosmos always existed and will exist, or has it been created out of NOTHING?
After all, one may construct, very easily, mathematical equation that proves "nothing" theory (find it inside the book).
Can cosmos be self-reproductive or cyclical? John Barrow and his colleague Mariusz Dabrowski discovered answer to the latter.
Few explanations:
Figure 8.2 (Mexican hat): horizontal axes (both) can be labeled as Higgs field values.
Figure 8.5: horizontal axis contains label for the scalar field as well.
Figure 7.11 contains symbol "phi" (zero with slash): it represents the golden ratio and equals (1 + square root of 5)/2 = 1.61803...
Sentence on page 248 (paperback edition) should read: "..so in combination they can pin down the Universe by their overlap with far greater certainty (not "uncertainty") than when taken singly." This sentence describes figure 8.10.
Finally I was overwhelmed and amused by many great citations, that shine along the text. Some of them are really funny; some are incredibly deep and surprising.
Here is a sample of the funny one:
"I must say that I find TV very educational. Whenever somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book".
For sure, go and read John Barrow's, you will not regret.
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D. Muchow
2.0 out of 5 stars Much Ado about NothingReviewed in the United States on September 5, 2001
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I was surprised, in a book about Vacuum, not to encounter any mention of its canonical forms (Casimir, Rindler, Inflationary, Cosmic String, and "Groundhog Day"...but I may be leaving one out), as were detailed in J. Richard Gott's book, _Time Travel in Einstein's Universe_. One would think, with Nothing else to write about (pun intended), this book would go into greater depth on the subject of what is known about Vacuum and the distribution of energy density, for instance. The best I can say is that this book should be read as more of a history of the concept of nothingness, of which it presents a very good treatment.
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Bill Barnard
5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in the United States on March 8, 2017
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as advertised, well packed
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Kevin Freeman
5.0 out of 5 stars The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Void, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the UniverseReviewed in the United States on December 12, 2012
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Excellent item! This is really an amazing item that anybody could buy for their very own personal time and pleasure.
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Anthony
3.0 out of 5 stars Awesome history and knowledgeReviewed in the United States on July 2, 2014
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just wanted more of course, like anyone would about where and how we are here. easy read, just to add to the brain.
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Luigi
4.0 out of 5 stars Very well written book.Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2002
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Easy to understand yet fairly complex in details. Nice job.
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ArchCritic
4.0 out of 5 stars Nothing that accounts for almost everythingReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 3, 2014
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John Barrow provides enjoyably readable explanations for some of the salient issues in number theory, physics and cosmology. His treatment of the history of zero (number theory) and the concept of zero-point energy of vacuum space (physics and cosmology) is informative and nicely written. It might at first be difficult to see why those two separate subjects should be encapsulated in the one book, in that just the word 'zero' seems to unite them. However, Barrow's subtext is the history of thought regarding Nature and Existence and his discussion of how zero was incorporated from the East into late medieval western numerals provides for historical backdrop. Unavailable to ancient Greeks and Romans and hence the West for most of its civilized history, zero provides for continuity between negative and positive numbers.
Science (also accounting and engineering) in the West has since mushroomed with the full set of numerals at our disposal. In physics today, the residual energy of matter below 'zero-point' is thought to be ever unavailable for exploitation, even at the coldest temperatures. Despite attempts, technology cannot exploit matter as energy source at zero-point: the residual or ground energy that is locked into matter at the coldest temperatures.
Barrow provides us with the link in ideas between ancient and modern. His large ambition and erudition duly deserves five stars but, as mentioned below, for a salient omission in his presentation, I deduct the one star.
"Not until the last half of the twentieth century would it be appreciated how the vastness of the universe is necessary for the existence of life on a single planet within it." Also, "If our universe was less of a vacuum it could not be an abode for living complexity" (pg. 121). The progress of western mathematics and cosmology parallels investigation of the vacuum. "Only a fraction of the possible patterns of mathematics are used in Nature." (p.158) Whereas, "if we believe Nature to be rational then no part of physical reality could be described by a mathematically non-existent structure." (p.162). Barrow discusses the contributions of the scientific greats, from Galileo to Einstein. As is obligatory in books of this kind, Roger Bacon and Immanuel Kant get a mention, as also do the ancient Greek luminaries.
Whereas late medieval science construed the void as comprising ether, we now know that no vacuum can be empty because of residual inherent energy at close to zero temperatures. Einstein replaced the ether in scientific thought with ubiquitous electromagnetic fields. It is electromagnetism that accounts for residual energy in matter below zero point accessibility and that fills the entirety of space - including the space between nucleus and electron orbitals in atoms. Contrary to mediaeval Christianity and also ancient Indian notions of divine nothingness, in our universe nothingness has no objective validity. Einstein's huge contribution to modern science is nicely and succinctly described by Barrow.
"The quantum vacuum with its seething mass of activity has ultimately proved to be the foundation for all our detailed understanding of the most elementary particles of matter" (pg. 226). Everywhere 'virtual' (unmeasurable except in the laboratory for the Lamb shift and Casimir effect) and real (measurable) particle-antiparticle pairings perturb space. An understanding of the physics of the vacuum has propelled cosmology, sub-atomic physics and the exploitation of superconductivity. The very small in Nature has immediate impact on our understanding of the very large. In respect of the forces of Nature, the importance of temperature in the evolution of the very early universe is discussed. Heat energy is but one very important manifestation of whatever energy actually is. With respect to black body radiation (such as the cosmic background radiation), "...'temperature' is a measure of the average value of the energy" - energy that can only be emitted in particular quanta (pg. 213).
Other readers have said that Barrow's explanations of the more difficult aspects of cosmology and physics are not entirely clear in places and I agree to some extent. In fact, he seems rather to gloss explanation in favour of description on occasion, notably when explaining black hole radiation (p.240), a controversial subject that has experts in disagreement. (The Wikipedia article on Hawking black hole radiation is likewise incomplete in explaining, almost identically to Barrow's account, the theoretical phenomenon, of just how the black hole absorption of one half of a virtual particle-antiparticle pairing gives rise to energy loss. It is by no means obvious to the general reader.)
I should like to give 'Nothing' five stars but was rather dismayed by his treatment of vacuum energy in relation to dark energy expansion of space. In note 28 of Chp 6, he says that, with 95% confidence, 'the contribution of the vacuum energy (of space) is about 50% more than that of all ordinary matter in the universe' (paraphrase). This is now largely redundant physics, I understand. The relevance of vacuum energy to spatial expansion seems to be a major lacuna in cosmology today. Barrow would have known in 2000-2001 when he finished writing 'Nothing' that Weinberg (1989) had pointed out the enormous discrepancy by greater than 70 orders of magnitude in calculation that vacuum energy seems not to account for accelerating spatial expansion - nobody knows what dark energy actually comprises but that it accounts for 70% composition of universal mass-energy and its astounding anti-gravitational effect, as gauged by redshift in supernova type 1a luminosity. George Ellis points to Weinberg's noted discrepancy as a major cosmological problem in various of his more recent publications, whilst Barrow disappointingly affords it no mention whatsoever. Having consulted Wikipedia articles on vacuum energy and zero-point energy, I feel justified in making criticism here, even though those articles likewise fail to elucidate the controversy - the word 'mystery' is used in place of discussion.
Another example of gloss occurs on p.237, in respect of vacuum polarisation: we are told that "The deep symmetry of the forces that would be found at high energies (when the universe was very young and very hot) is possible only because of the contributions of the quantum vacuum." This statement comes across more as a soundbite than a summary.
In Chapter 7, Barrow explains the vacuum sea of particles and antiparticles that, virtual and real, bubble or seethe throughout all vacuum space. He explains the difference between notionally virtual and real fleeting sub-microscopic particles in relation to Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle: it appears that the principle is broken in the case of virtual particle-antiparticle pairings - 'virtual' particles are real but because they are within Planck scale cannot be directly measured. (The effects of vacuum polarization have been experimentally observed, according to Wikipedia: to quote, "virtual electron-positron pairs that change the distribution of charges and currents that generated the original electromagnetic field. It is also sometimes referred to as the self energy of the gauge boson (photon).")
With regard to the laboratory, I found Barrow's explanation of the Casimir effect particularly good in comparison to other authors I have read, as also his explanation of the Lamb shift, both due to extremely small but measurable (electromagnetic) fluctuations, such effect as was omitted from Dirac's prior ground breaking relativistic account of the electron (and his brilliant prediction of the positron).
The quantum nature of sub-microscopic physics vis-a-vis (meso-macro scale) classical physics is dealt with in the book: Barrow discusses the wavelength criteria that distinguishes quantum from classical objects - an object's size is inversely proportional to its energy wavelength such that (I deduce) quantum effects occur (for very tiny objects such as sub-atomic particles) where wavelength is greater than size. (This has curious ramifications today for evident entanglement of larger than sub-atomic objects, outside the scope of this book.)
In summary, Barrow imparts a very good account of the vacuum energy of space, if unconvincingly in respect of spatial expansion. The same is true of his book, 'The Constants of Nature,' where (p.270f) he seems to say that vacuum energy is primarily responsible for expansion. I think his book is worthy of revision today; otherwise, it is superseded by later publications on the same topic I have yet to read. Nevertheless, I am most grateful to John Barrow for his breadth and depth of exposition on the enormous subject of Nothing.
Lastly, the importance of not just the cosmic vacuum but, in general, the extremely small in Nature as regards useful explanation of the very large characterizes this book, as indeed all serious explanations of cosmology. Like other authors on cosmology and physics I have read, Barrow assumes the yet to be proven existence of the graviton and gravity waves. (Perhaps the experiment at CERN may yet qualify today's lacuna in this regard.)
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B. Hudson
5.0 out of 5 stars Good readReviewed in the United Kingdom on July 24, 2010
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I agree with the other reviewers about the first part being a bit slow but it's interesting stuff and I'm glad I read it. Generally the book is very well written. I was glad to see details of the important physics experiments of the past and how the results were often a surprise to their discoverers who often found them very hard to explain.
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Vivek Pal Singh
5.0 out of 5 stars John Barrow is excellentReviewed in India on August 20, 2021
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I dislike NOTHING 😉 about this book 😀
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Mrigèndra
5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in India on March 17, 2017
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Great book.
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閑閑
4.0 out of 5 stars 読みやすく楽しめる本ですReviewed in Japan on October 15, 2005
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題名からして宇宙物理学のみの内容かなと思っていましたが、前半部分は主に「無」や「ゼロ」の概念に焦点を当て、文化人類学的アプローチをとっています。
なぜあれだけの論理学や哲学に華やいだギリシャで「ゼロ」というものが生まれなかったのか。また、マヤ、バビロニア、インドでの「ゼロ」の概念の違いはどういうものなのか。それぞれの宇宙論を背景にした宗教的、哲学的な「無」や「空」というコンセプトを説明しており、なるほどと思うことが多くありました。
後半は数学、物理学の面から「無」を斬ります。それぞれが一般読者向けに描写、解説してあるので比較的分かりやすいものでした。
やはり宇宙は大きな謎と好奇心をかきたててくれるものです。
宇宙がどのように拡大しつつあるのか、一体いくつ存在するのか、始まりと終わりはあるのかなど、あくまで仮説ではありますが、大変面白いものでした。
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BetseaK
Oct 15, 2017BetseaK rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: physics, cosmology, science, maths, philosophy
Fascinating! Who would have thought you could find out so many things in a book of nothing!
The book explains, in a compelling and readable way, every angle of the concept of nothing, or rather from whence the difficulties comprehending it arise.
I found it captivating to read and learn how the ancient Greeks' demand for logical consistency of their concepts prevented them to invent the useful mathematical zero symbol and how the theological disputes about the reality of a physical equivalent to zero – a vacuum – stimulated the mathematician Torricelli, Galileo's student, to use mercury in order to remove air from a glass tube, thereby constructing creating a sustained physical vacuum for the first time.
As for the more recent scientific approach to the deeper paradox of whether there could exist a physical Nothing, I found Barrow's explication spellbinding. His presentation of the Casimir effect is the best I've read so far and I really liked his explication of ''why there is something rather than nothing'', namely that the idea of the void and of nothingness or empty space violates the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. So, it seems there cannot be such thing as ''nothing''. Rather, the vacuum is merely the lowest energy state available and it presents itself as the lambda force (the Einstein's cosmological constant).
I also found Barrow's explanations of the symmetry breaking, the unification of the three forces (excluding gravity) at ultra-high temperatures/energies as well as his explications of what is known as the cosmological 'inflation' much clearer than in other popular science books I've read.
And there is much more in this book than I can mention in my review. Go and read it! (less)
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Jimmy Ele
Oct 17, 2017Jimmy Ele rated it it was amazing
Shelves: foundation
An amazing array of ideas about Nothing. Bewildering scholarly display of eruditon. From zero to the end of the universe, an astounding odyssey through abstract realms.
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Nathan
Sep 10, 2007Nathan rated it liked it · review of another edition
Recommends it for: Stop it, you're killing me.
Shelves: science, science-physics-astronomy
Quantum physics, if it is real, requires that there be no such thing as nothing. Ergo, nothing is real. And maybe, even, everything is nothing. And John D. Barrow gets 3 stars instead of 4 for assuming I already had six Ph.D's by the time I decided to read this book. (Did anybody read Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits? Yeah. Exactly.) And despite the fact that I didn't understand the majority of what he was saying (though I did feel a wisp of air over my head at times, and that's close), I thought The Book of Nothing was fascinating and hard to put down. It did kind of reinforce my neophytic theory that quantum physics may well be little more than pseudo-religious philosophy with fancy math attached. But it also made me jealous that even if people like Barrow can't speak my language (words, sentences, etc.), for better or worse, he gets to speak the language of "God" (math, numbers, decimals, assorted bits of what looks like Latin). All of it in an effort to partially explain man's long and complicated relationship with the concept of "nothing" (re: "irony"), and how modern cosmology is changing that conception (re: "cosmic irony"). The philosophical implications of this book led me toward my own rather brilliant thought experiments in alcohol mixing and binge drinking, and I shall forever be in Barrow's debt for a particular weekend in late 2006. I don't think I had the reaction Barrow was hoping for, and in fact, I'm pretty sure I'm not even a part of his intended audience. Frankly, his work is out of my league and doesn't translate well into my language (Idiot). But it was fascinating, nonetheless, and there is no way to read this book and not find yourself spending a lot of time... thinking.
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Phil
Aug 09, 2014Phil rated it it was ok · review of another edition
Somewhat muddled presentation about interesting concepts. Convoluted to justify the book's title at times. ...more
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Kededra
Oct 29, 2014Kededra rated it liked it
This is a book about nothing. Literally.
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Ami Iida
Nov 21, 2016Ami Iida rated it really liked it
Shelves: physics
the first half is useless but since chapter 5 it's intriguing.
it's intriguing from the origin of the universe to vacuum.
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Dennis Littrell
Apr 17, 2010Dennis Littrell rated it it was amazing
Shelves: physics
Barrow, John D. Book of Nothing, The: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe (2000)
How nothing became something
"Nothing is Real." --The Beatles, "Strawberry Fields Forever"
As quoted by Professor Barrow on page 8, this is a pun on what the Beatles had in mind, and is in essence what this book is all about. Nothing is real in the sense that it is no longer the nothing that it once was. It is actually "something." On the next page, to further illustrate the point, Barrow quotes the lyric from Freddie Mercury (of Queen), "Nothing really matters." It does indeed!
The impetus for this, Barrow's latest book on cosmology, seems to be the growing realization that the vacuum of space ("nothing") is not entirely empty, and in fact cannot in principle ever be empty. As Barrow explains in Chapter 7, "The Box that Can Never Be Empty," it would be a violation of the Uncertainty Principle because, "If we could say that there were no particles in a box, that it was completely empty of all mass and energy," we would have "perfect information about motion at every point and about the energy of the system at a given instant of time" (p. 204). This rather simple, but shocking revelation, has consequences that are shaking the very foundation of our understanding of the cosmos. Quite simply it appears that there is no such thing as nothing.
Barrow lays the ground work for this revelation by first exploring the nature of nothing as seen by the ancients, noting in particular the Greek abhorrence of the very idea that the vacuum could exist ("horror vacui"). In Chapter One, "Zero - The Whole Story," (which follows Chapter Nought) he recalls the history of zero and how it finally found acceptance. So great was the Greek horror of nothing that they did not have a zero in their number system. Many people found the idea of nothing and of zero frightening and impious. However, as Barrow shows, eventually zero triumphed over its adversaries because of its usefulness. In the next chapter, "Much Ado About Nothing," Barrow recalls the medieval debates about the vacuum, whether it exists, whether it existed before the creation of the world, and whether it was possible to create a vacuum. He recounts attempts to create a vacuum in Chapter Three, "Constructing Nothing," and then discusses the once and future ether that Einstein had so completely demolished. (It's back! But it's called the vacuum and it seems to have more properties than the old ether ever had.) In Chapter Five, "Whatever Happened to Zero?" Barrow explores some non-Euclidian geometries and shows how numbers are created out of the empty set in set theory, a neat ironic analogy to how universes are perhaps created out of the vacuum.
Beginning in Chapter Six, "Empty Universes," Barrow concentrates on cosmology. I have to warn you that, despite Professor Barrow's elegant and graceful style and an abundance of charts, sidebars, lively quotes, and illustrations, this is not an easy read. The subject at the level Barrow wants to discuss it, is quite frankly very difficult. I have followed cosmology as a hobby for many years, but I am not a physicist or a mathematician. Those who are will probably have an easier time of it. Nonetheless, I learned a lot from this book and if I had wanted to "study" the text, could have learned a lot more. One thing I did not learn, something I have yet to find in any book on cosmology, is an answer to the question, What is the source of the energy that drives the expansion of the universe? Or put another way, what caused the singularity to "explode"? (Any reader know the answer?)
Barrow shows that one of the things that recent cosmology has done to the Big Bang universe that was said to contain all of space and time (leaving no possibility for "nothing" or "anything" to exist "outside" of it since there was no outside) is to allow it to be part of a larger, possibly infinite universe. The idea that our universe may be but one of an infinite number of universes all popping probabilistically out of the vacuum is mind boggling beyond any ability to describe it. In reference to the possible eternal expansion of our particular universe, Barrow notes on page 300 that "When there is an infinite time to wait then anything that can happen, eventually will happen." Applying this deduction to that possible infinity of universes, one finds a companion to the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics in which a new universe is created with every quantum event, a companion that asserts that in an infinite universe every possible event will take place, and every thought unthought will eventually be thought, that indeed there are unicorns somewhere and politicians who don't lie, and a place where bread always lands butter side up.
Faced with this whimsy, I suspect that Barrow would quickly point out that that is why in physics when infinities come up in the equations, it is a sure sign that something is wrong. Nevertheless, the cosmos as revealed by modern astronomy, astrophysics, relativity, quantum mechanics, and the ideas from string theory, is a story of breathtaking and mind boggling sweep and grandeur, often totally unintuitive and beyond our wildest imaginings. As picturesque, inventive and psychologically satisfying as the tales of the ancients about the cosmos are (e.g., " It's turtles all the way down!") they pale beside the conception of the universe as seen by modern science. Professor Barrow is one of the very best at bringing this vision to lay readers, and The Book of Nothing is not to be missed. (less)
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Abbey
Aug 22, 2017Abbey rated it liked it
Well researched and engagingly written, although apparently John Barrow's research did not extend to ensuring that his mental health metaphors were accurate. He refers to the nature of light as being schizophrenic, which is very puzzling because I'm pretty sure light doesn't suffer from delusions or hallucinations. I suspect he actually meant to cite DID - Dissociative Identity Disorder (what used to be known as Multiple Personality Disorder), but I really don't see why mental health analogies are appropriate in a book about science anyway. (less)
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