The Problem of Beginnings: III. Nothing Has No Address

We have removed before from the place where we had put it.

There is no obvious earlier time in which the universe was waiting to begin.

So perhaps we can try another answer.

Before the universe, there was nothing.

This sounds different.

But does it?

Try to imagine it.

What do you see?

Perhaps darkness.

An empty expanse.

No stars.

No matter.

No movement.

Nothing at all.

But notice what has happened.

We have imagined a place.

And there is already a problem.

If space began with the universe, there can be no empty space before the universe.

An empty room is still a room.

A dark sky is still a sky.

A vacant landscape is still a landscape.

We have not imagined nothing.

We have imagined something in which nothing is happening.

Perhaps we can remove the space.

Then what remains?

Nothing.

But for how long?

We have now smuggled time back in.

We have imagined nothing lasting until the universe appeared.

But something that lasts has a history.

And something with a history already exists within a temporal order.

So we remove time as well.

Now there is no place for nothing to be.

And no time for it to last.

And no distinction between nothing and anything else.

The imagination begins to fail.

This may not be an accident.

Perhaps nothing is not a primitive condition from which something can emerge.

Perhaps it is a concept that only becomes possible within a world of distinctions.

We can say that a room is empty because we know what could be in it.

We can say that a glass contains nothing because we know what it would mean for it to contain something.

Absence is intelligible because there is something whose absence can be recognised.

Even emptiness has an address.

But absolute nothingness has nowhere to live.

There is no place in which it occurs.

No time during which it persists.

No boundary separating it from something else.

No observer standing outside it to notice that it is empty.

This creates a peculiar reversal.

We usually imagine:

First there was nothing.

Then something appeared.

But perhaps nothing is not the simpler state.

Perhaps it is the more sophisticated concept.

To call something absent already requires a world in which presence and absence can be distinguished.

So perhaps the universe did not emerge from nothing.

Perhaps the very idea of nothingness depends upon a world in which something can be absent.

If so, we have been asking the question backwards.

We began by asking how something could emerge from nothing.

Perhaps we should ask instead:

How did the possibility of nothing become possible?