Easily the most perplexing question one can possibly ask is, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Existence is not an obviously reasonable state of affairs, whereas nothingness does not seem to require any explanation at all. Confronted with an endless void, utterly empty, barren, and cold, one might say, “Well, of course. What did you expect?” But existence, once given any thought at all, quickly becomes an intellectual abomination. It is no wonder that the gods, before they got around to burdening us with all sorts of ethical dicta, first busied themselves with creation. That there are things is more puzzling than any of the things that are.
If the efforts of current cosmologists are any indication, the assumption of nothing is not as easy as it sounds. Typically, it is conceived as a quantum field devoid of matter, but already fortified by the laws, forces, and fields with which physicists are familiar. By contrast, the nothingness I have in mind is what we can call true nothingness, an emptiness so complete that it lacks even the structure and energy of a quantum field. To get our bearings, we can think of this brand of nothing as contentless, void, or uniformly empty. These and similar ideas draw attention to the fact that nothingness completely lacks any positive properties. It is defined entirely by absence; it is the opposite of existence. At first glance, this does not bode well for the universe. Without God or something else inexplicable to break the monotony, nothing appears to follow from nothing; ex nihilo, nihil fit. This conclusion has certainly been the favorite of philosophers as well as common sense for as far back as one cares to look. It is also the reason modern cosmologists recoil from true nothingness and feel compelled to supplement the void with ready-made quantum fields. But it may be that there is more to the void than meets the eye.
Though it may not yet imply any thing, the void does seem to imply infinity and eternity. Placing an edge or boundary somewhere in the void and declaring an end to it involves the imposition of something, and something is more than nothing. Any such boundary violates our assumption as well as raises the question of what lies beyond it. Consequently, assuming nothing implies an infinite expanse of it. Only the ad hoc addition of some object—however nebulous or abstract—into the void can prevent it from being infinite. Likewise, there is no temporal beginning or end to the void either. Even if time is defined as nothing more than the passage of events, and there are no events actually occurring, the void qua nothingness imposes no restrictions on any hypothetical events that might happen to occur there. For the special case in which there are no events, time can be conceived as simply a degree of freedom, much like the three dimensions of space. It makes no difference that there is nothing there, only that, if there were, it would be unrestricted in the temporal dimension just as it is unrestricted in the three spatial dimensions.
It is critical here to note that infinite space and time are not new assumptions but simply an elucidation of the original assumption of nothing. Infinity follows necessarily from nothingness; it is not something that has been added to it. Nothingness is four infinite degrees of freedom. It is that which does not get in the way. Any object introduced into the void is absolutely unaffected by it. The object is, while the void is not. A philosopher might object here by claiming that I have introduced the notions of dimension and expanse. Why not assume instead that nothingness is dimensionless? If I were to do that, however, the void would oppose the existence of objects with which we are already familiar, and in that respect, it would not be nothing. Nothingness, after all, is not only or even primarily way out there, inaccessible and impossibly distant. Rather, it is all around us, not getting in the way of everything that exists. Only an infinite and eternal four-dimensional expanse—four infinite degrees of freedom—can completely fail to oppose the existence of all that exists. In essence, our familiar four-dimensional world guarantees that nothingness possesses four infinite degrees of freedom.1
1 To be perfectly rigorous here, this claim could be made even less controversial by stating it as a hypothetical, viz, that the following theory is [provisionally] based on an infinite, four-dimensional universe. But should it ever be discovered that this assumption is untrue (as it would be if String Theory were proven correct), the theory described in this book would be invalidated. Or, more simply, this theory is true only for an infinite four-dimensional universe.
Related Article: Reframing the Substantivalism Debate
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