Imagining nothing
I started reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything today, and before I’d got thirty pages in, I was distracted by a thought (which is why it sometimes takes me a long time to get through books). The passage I was reading was about the Big Bang, and how time and space begin at that precise moment:
It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no around around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can’t even ask how long it has been there—-whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there for ever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn’t exist. There is no past from it to emerge from. (p. 28)
Now, this isn’t a new idea to me, and I can see the logic to it perfectly well; time and space were created in the Big Bang, so neither could have existed before the Big Bang and it came—-literally—-out of nothing. Fine. Only it isn’t fine. When I try to imagine nothingness, my brain sneaks in some container for the nothingness, or some frame of reference. When I try to insist that it really is nothing—-not just an absence of something filling something else, my brain whimpers and tries to hide. I assume that I’m not the only one, so why do we find it so hard to imagine true nothingness? Our brains just don’t seem to be able to cope with the concept.
Science has pushed back the boundaries of what we have to try to imagine and visualise, so perhaps this is a temporary deficiency, and we’ll eventually be able to do it. I’d be interested to hear from physicists, mathematicians and cosmologists and see how you cope with imagining the unimaginable. I wonder if this inability is behind some of our spiritual beliefs? If you can’t imagine nothingness after death, you create a container—-heaven or hell.
By a huge coincidence, I spotted a highly relevant sight gag in the episode of Futurama I watched today on DVD. The planet Eternium (Nibbler’s homeworld) is shown from space, with the caption, “Inconceivable Dimensions Not Shown”.
