Friday 20 February 2015

NOTHING

Was reading these threads on reddit askscience and had an interesting thought, see below.

Now to challenge some philosophical arguments.

Solid... doesn't exist
Atoms are mostly empty space, sub-atomic particles seem to act like both waves and particles, in that they diffract, and can cancel the other out in a wave like pattern.
We look at a cup, a table, a wall, and perceive it as solid. This is simply a mistake of our senses, it is made up of atoms all jiggling around depending on their temperature, interacting with each other via short and long wave forces mediated by tiny sub-atomic particles, but never touching.
Yes nothing is truly solid, if lights wavelength were small enough you could see it shining through anything, if you could selectively nullify the electromagnetic force you could likely walk through that wall, or fall through the floor without an atom of yours touching another.

Touch... doesn't exist
When I touch these keys on the keyboard, my atoms are not actually coming into contact with the atoms of the keys, the electromagnetic force keep a space between them. Where my electrons to interfere (not even touching) with the electrons of a keyboard atom the atoms would join to form a compound, where my protons to interact with the keyboard atoms protons I wouldn't finish this sentence due to release of energy via a fusion reaction.
This is all science, well known and understood. Atoms do not touch in the sense that we think of touch, a field similar in idea to a bar magnets field lines reachs out from our hand and interacts with a field on the mouse we are touching, the chair, everything, even one cell in your body to another cell, even one water molecule in that cell and another, they never touch.


Nothing... doesn't exist.
You may have worked out where I was going with this, nothing doesn't exist the same as touch and solid don't. Nothing is a word we use to describe the absence of everything. Problem is modern research has found that nothing doesn't exist anywhere in the universe. Nothing as Lawrence Krauss describes in his book "A universe from nothing", actually gives way to a lot of something. Virtual particles that pop into existence for a brief moment, then wink out as they interact with their opposite that also pops into existence.
William Lane Craig likes to rail against this position that the nothing of Krauss is not the nothing of philosophy, and thus the true nothing in which his God would work. Just like solid and touch, this nothing doesn't exist. It is a left over from language used by creatures that were not knowledgable enough to know that this phenomenon didn't actually exist.

So next time someone says Krauss was redefining nothing ask them to touch you, or show you a solid object and then explain to them the error of their thinking.