The Nothing

The Nothing Contents 

Introduction 1 

Daoism’s Reification of Nothingness 2 Buddhism’s Use and Denial of Nothingness 3 

Western Views 3 The Scientific View 4 

Parmenides 4 Method 6 

Possibilities 6 Non-entities 7 

Causation by Absence 8 Negative Properties 8 

First Conclusion: The Emptiness of Emptiness 9 Counter 10 

Creatio ex Nihilo 11 The Unprecedented Void 12 

General Solution with Higher  and Regular Dimensions 14 

Disappearance of Higher Dimensions 15 Special Solution with Only Regular Dimensions 17 

Final Conclusion: The Plenitude of the Nothing 18 Bibliography 18

Introduction Is the Nothing actually something?  

Stephen Mumford in his book Absence and Nothing,  the Philosophy of What There is Not published in  

2021 gives a fair hearing to Nothingness and  its correlates being actualities, but then  

refutes them to explain why Nothingness is in fact  nothing. Not nothing at all, just nothing actual.  

In any such work on the nature of Nothingness,  it is important to clarify one’s terminology to  

avoid confusion. I will use terms like actual,  actuality, exist and existence when referring  

to the actuality of things including the Nothing,  while words like real and reality will refer to  

how some things can be real but not actual. Things  that are actual are real, such as how Descartes in  

his radical doubt concludes that he exists because  there is otherwise no one doing the doubting. Some  

things are real but not actual, such as Alice  in Wonderland or Santa Claus. This then leaves  

us to ponder, what is the kind of reality that  things that are real but not actual possess,  

if any? This is the crux of Mumford’s book. Before we turn to Mumford, let us consider the  

various takes on the nature of Nothingness.  There are logically four categories:

1) Nothingness is actual. 2) Nothingness is real but  

not actual. Its proponents may grant  the usefulness of such a concept,  

even its necessity, but do not consider it actual. 

3) An agnosticism or uncertainty  towards the nature of Nothingness. 

4) Nothingness is not just not  actual, it is not even real.

Daoism’s Reification of Nothingness On the first category, some schools of  

thought that teach non-dualism and certain  religions and mystical traditions consider  

Nothingness to be actual. Daoism is a key  example. The Tao Te Ching reifies Nothingness  

or Emptiness as mysterious yet the origin of  everything. Let us consider three passages:

The Dao as a thing is elusive and indistinct.  Though indistinct and elusive, within it  

there is an image. Elusive and indistinct,  within it there is a thing. Deep and dark,  

within is an essence. Within this essence  is fundamental reality, within it is truth.

There is an undefined thing that came  before heaven and earth. Still and formless,  

alone and immutable, circulating  everywhere yet not diminished,  

it is the mother of Heaven and Earth. I do not  know its name, but if I am forced to name it,  

it is the Dao. If forced to name it, I  name it the Great. As Great, it ever flows.

Though the Dao is empty, its uses are  inexhaustible. It is so deep that all things  

come from it, so profound that it dulls sharpness,  unravels complications, tempers brightness, unites  

dust, while remaining tranquil. Who could have  birthed it since it seems to precede even God?

Laozi realises that the Dao is ineffable.  Human understanding is not sufficient to  

fully comprehend it, making words inadequate  to express the nature of the Dao. However,  

he nonetheless within such limitations tries to  express the profundity of how this Emptiness,  

this Nothingness that is the Dao is the origin and  continued source of existence for all of reality. 

Buddhism’s Use and Denial of Nothingness Buddhism also takes Nothingness seriously.  

It understands sunyata as the state of Nothingness  where there is no distinction between things. As  

the Heart Sutra tells us: “Form is Emptiness,  Emptiness is Form.” This lack of differentiation  

means that all things are interconnected,  which is taught by Buddha as the Principle of  

Dependent Origination. Keiji Nishitani of the  Kyoto School explains sunyata as the ground,  

the basis, of reality. Yet Buddhism goes  so far as to then let go of emptiness,  

teaching the emptiness of emptiness. They do  not reify emptiness. The Samyutta Nikaya says:  

“‘There is,’ […] this is one dead end. ‘There  is not,’ this is another dead-end. Without  

veering towards either of these dead-ends, the  Tathagata teaches the Dhamma by the middle.” 

Hence, Buddhism’s stance is  not about an emptiness per se,  

that from nothing can spring forth anything, but  the lack of essential identity of any one thing,  

since it owes its existence to other things and  context. This will occupy the second category,  

where Nothingness is a concept  that is real but not actual.  

I may however be overgeneralising. To speak of  Buddhism as if it has a singular doctrine will  

be remiss since its various sects and schools have  differing emphasis and even beliefs that differ. 

Western Views Western philosophy has to some extent  

been influenced by Eastern traditions, obvious  examples being thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer  

who explicitly discusses his Hindu and Buddhist  influences, Martin Heidegger who influenced and  

was influenced by Eastern traditions but to even  earlier thinkers such as the ancient Greeks,  

since trade routes have been established even  in those times connecting the West and Asia.  

Whether Heidegger reifies Nothingness or not  is debatable, and perhaps he can fall then  

into my third category. Jean Paul Sartre tells us  about an ancient Greek distinction of totality,  

where the first is the universe-of-things familiar  to us while the second includes the first but also  

the nothingness surrounding this universe, to  then really encompass the totality of everything,  

the universe-of-things plus the Nothingness  outside it, hence falling into my first category  

of the actuality of the Nothing. The Scientific View 

Before we can leave my scanty and hence inevitably  oversimplifying overview of the various positions,  

we should consider the position of science.  Early scientific thinking, perhaps what some may  

consider as pre or proto-scientific, of thinkers  such as Aristotle deny Nothingness. ‘Nature abhors  

a vacuum’ in their metaphysics which then leads to  paradoxes such as how things can therefore move if  

there is no emptiness for them to move into. If  there is no movement, how can there be change?  

Epicurus does conceive of the void to solve  this problem, with atoms that can swerve in a  

void that gives rise to change and indeterminism.  Much later, in the 16th century, Giordano Bruno  

posits an infinite universe that is continuous  with no void in between, where seemingly empty  

space is filled by the ether. Isaac Newton also  thinks that there must be an ether since material  

contact seems required to transmit forces. A  vacuum was thought impossible though Galileo  

Galilei had theories on how to make one. One was  finally ‘made’ in 1643 by his student Evangelista  

Toricelli, where the empty space above a column of  mercury was recognised for what it was, a vacuum. 

Today, we have no problems with vacuums, using  them in vacuum tubes and vacuum cleaners.  

More significantly, our current scientific  understanding is that emptiness seems to pervade  

much of the universe, from the vast emptiness of  outer space to how most of the volume of an atom  

is empty. Yet this latter emptiness described  by quantum theory is not quite a void devoid  

of anything. It is a space filled with fields  which fluctuations and interactions can give rise  

momentarily to energy and virtual particles. Even  the lowest possible energy state of zero Kelvins  

is not a state devoid of all energy. There seems  to be no genuine void possible on such an account  

due to Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Parmenides 

We are now ready to turn to Mumford’s account  which grounds itself on Parmenides’s influential  

account against Nothingness. Around 500  BCE, Parmenides wrote a poem entitled On  

Nature. Some of its lines are lost as with  all of his other writings but this work,  

which predates Socrates and hence Plato and  Aristotle, is an important touchstone which  

later thinkers have to respond to. As the  title implies, Parmenides is describing an  

ontology of what is, which is Being, and  what is not, which is nothing—not Nothing  

as a reified something but Nothing as really  nothing at all, neither actual nor real. He  

is then one of the rare thinkers that fall  into my fourth category. Mumford summarises  

Parmenides’s Way of Truth that encapsulates  the following propositions about Nothingness:

P1: Nothing is not. 

P2: There are no degrees of being. P3: Nothing comes from nothing. 

P4: Non-being is unknowable. P5: Reality is a single plenum. 

P6: Non-being is unthinkable and unnameable. P7: Neither motion nor change is possible.

Parmenides’s argument is systematic. Nothingness  has no existence. There are no degrees of Being,  

meaning either things exist or do not with  no possible state in between. Because of  

the non-existence of Nothingness and no degrees  of Being, we cannot possibly know the nature of  

Nothingness. This means that we cannot speak about  it or even think of it. Change is impossible since  

what is is and cannot not exist, while what is not  is not and cannot exist. There is hence no way for  

things to change and develop, making the movement  of becoming inadmissible, which then implies that  

reality is an actual monolithic unchanging whole. A hard-Parmenidean will believe that all of  

Parmenides’s seven propositions are true. Mumford  does not go so far. He agrees with Parmenides that  

the Nothing does not exist and that there are  no degrees of Being. Because Nothingness does  

not exist, no existence can come from it. He  however believes that it is possible to think  

and speak about Nothingness since that is what  he, we and Parmenides himself do. Nothingness  

can hence “subsist” as a concept, not quite a  full-fledged existence but an intellectual one  

which is why it is termed subsistence, a state  where it is real but not actual. Moreover,  

he does not agree that just because there  is no Nothingness, that change and movement  

then becomes impossible. They are possible and  indeed are actual because the concept of Being  

requires the conceptual foil of Nothingness. He  hence regards himself as a “soft-Parmenidean.” 

Method There are  

two dimensions to the question of nothingness,  ontological and epistemological/methodological.  

As an epistemological point, Mumford sides with  William of Occam that we should not multiply  

entities unnecessarily. Hence we should avoid  admitting the existence of negative entities  

unless we have no choice but to do so. To see  why, consider an empty room with just a spoon  

in it. If negative entities are admitted, to  properly describe the room, we have to say that  

while it has one positive entity in it, the spoon,  we also have to note that it is empty of chairs,  

tables, hippopotamuses and in fact an infinite  number of non-present entities. Nonetheless,  

he accepts that if the Nothing is shown to be both  irreducible to positive terms and indispensable to  

our best possible theories, we then have to admit  of its existence. He notes that the best possible  

theory is not merely the best available theory  since our current state of knowledge may be far  

from complete. What then is a best theory? It  not only should able to explain the phenomena  

in its domain in an internally consistent way  but also “cohere with our wider theories.” 

Mumford makes a thorough study of what entities  exemplify the Nothing in common use in language  

and also the traditional ontological categories.  They include negative properties, “nonentities  

or negative particulars […] including limits and  boundaries, privations, shadows, holes, omissions,  

negative mathematical and logical entities, and  negative epistemic states.” He also discusses  

causation by absence and possibilities. Possibilities 

The nature of possibility is such that if all  mutually exclusive possibilities for an event  

are exhaustively listed, only one among them  becomes actual. What then is the reality of the  

possibilities that did not become actual?  Say we toss a coin and it comes up heads.  

David Lewis’s theory of Modal Realism suggests  that there are possible worlds where the coin toss  

comes up tails. For Lewis, possible worlds are not  just thought devices but actually exist. Hence the  

possibilities that are not actualised in our world  are actualised in some other world. In that way,  

all possibilities are actual. Mumford notes that  in addition to being ontologically extravagant,  

instead of explaining how something possible  is in fact actual, what modal realism does  

is broaden the scope of actuality such  that everything then becomes actual. 

Another theory is based on dispositions or powers.  Aristotle refers to these as “potency” that have  

the potential to become “act.” Say a bird has the  potency or potentiality to fly on its own power.  

It is currently at rest so its potentiality to  fly remains latent but nonetheless real. Contrast  

that with a human being, who does not have such  a potentiality. Hence the possibility of flying  

on our own power for us is not real and hence has  no possibility of being actual either. Disposition  

theory while outlining what is possible remains  non-actual until it is actualised. Not bad  

but Mumford thinks he can do better. He proposes a fictionalist approach,  

where mere possibilities which do not become  actual can subsist but only as fictions.  

Fictions are false but yet there seems to be  something real about them. While we are able  

to refer to non-entities, they have no referent  in existence. For instance we know of fictitious  

characters such as Sherlock Holmes, his  address and some events surrounding him,  

even the name of his friend, Watson, but there  is no Sherlock in existence. He, Watson, other  

fictitious or mythical objects like unicorns,  the number zero and the empty set “all have the  

same referent since there is only one nothing.”  But they are clearly not the same. Hence we need  

a theory of empty reference. Mumford’s theory  of empty reference is fictionalism. He writes:

We make fictional, pretended references to  things that we know do not exist, or we just  

fail to refer in cases where we are mistaken  in believing that things exist when they don’t.  

In either case, however, our  words can be about things,  

since one can think about things that do  not exist even if one cannot refer to them.

Hence we do not need to reify nothingness in order  to deal with possibilities. The Nothing is not  

indispensable for this class of non-entities. Non-entities 

Other non-entities include holes, shadows,  limits and boundaries. Such a hole is real,  

just like the edge of a piece of paper is real,  marking where the paper ceases to be but they both  

“involve a discontinuity.” As for shadows, they  are an “absence of light” caused by the “partial  

blocking of a light source.” When we speak of a  whole or totality, we must mean that beyond it,  

there is no more of it, for instance, our piece of  paper, the entire building or the whole world. It  

seems that to describe a totality, holes and other  omissions, the concept of what-is-not is needed. 

However, a hole in a piece of paper  needs the piece of paper as a host,  

just like how the nothingness beyond  the whole building or world requires  

the building and world as host. The host is an  actual positive entity that can account for the  

non-existent entity. Hence such non-entities  are reducible to positive terms. “Instead of  

asserting that the host is absent, at its  boundary, we deny that it is present there,  

better reflecting the metaphysical reality that  there is only what is,” adds Mumford. The hole in  

the paper is then a denial that there is paper  there in that space, just like the absence of  

world beyond the world can be on Mumford’s lights  more accurately described as a denial that there  

is more of the same world beyond the world. Mumford makes an important point that denial  

should be considered “a separate act from  assertion.” He writes: “Denial requires  

no ontological commitment to a truthmaker or  falsemaker.” By denying the presence of an entity,  

it is not that we are making an ontological  commitment to the existence of a negative entity.  

Instead we are denying the presence of a positive  entity, which if present, would have been the  

truthmaker. For instance, when I note that my keys  are missing from its bowl, I am not asserting the  

existence of not-keys in that bowl but is instead  denying that there are keys there. More generally,  

“there is a difference between believing not-P and  not believing P.” Negation and denial differ since  

negation is an assertion which then implies  an ontological commitment to the actuality  

of the negated object. Causation by Absence 

A prime characteristic of what makes a thing  actual is that it causes effects in other things.  

If there is no effect, then there is no sense  to speak of its cause, which seems to imply  

that the causes of material effects must be  existent. Causation by absence putatively  

takes place when an absence of something seems  to be the cause of an effect, which makes the  

absence an important phenomenon demonstrating  the actuality of the Nothing. For instance,  

missing the bus caused you to be late for work. Mumford explains that while absences can explain  

occurrences, they are powerless to actually cause  anything since the Nothing being nothing can  

possess no causal power; there is no truthmaker.  However they seem to be a cause because of a  

counterfactual. If you did not miss the bus, you  would have been on time to work but since you did  

miss the bus, you are late. Yet the missing  bus did not cause you to be late. Rather if  

the counterfactual had happened, if you had caught  the bus, you would have been on time. “There is no  

causation by absence, but there is explanation  by absence,” Mumford reiterates. The absent  

object or event is dispensable to a proper causal  explanation, reducible to its positive inversion. 

Negative Properties He also considers the  

nature of negative properties such as non-red,  not hot or cold as a lack of heat, not tall or  

short as opposed to tall, and not many but few.  Usually when several objects are considered to  

have the same properties, they are similar. For  instance, objects with both motors and wheels  

are vehicles. However, negative properties seem  to violate this “principle that a property is a  

One that runs through Many.” For instance, two  objects lacking wheels are rocks and scissors.  

Despite sharing this common albeit negative  property, they seemingly do not form a class.  

Hence, if a property is defined as a One that  runs through Many, then negative properties do  

not seem to be properties at all. Mumford however  points out that this argument is invalid since  

it is question begging, already assuming in its  formulation that negative properties do not exist.  

The way rocks and scissors are similar  is that they both have no wheels, the One  

running through Many being the lack of wheels. However, Mumford offers an explanation that he  

hopes dispenses with the actuality of negative  properties. How we recognise a negative property  

is when we perceive what a thing is not. For  instance, a lack of wheels in our rock and  

scissors or a man lacking hair on his head if  say it was a police line-up after we had been  

attacked by a bald man. We are looking for  a characteristic that is useful to us and  

this characteristic can be in the form of a  presence or an absence. If we are looking for  

our keys and do not find them at their usual  place, our expectations are disappointed. 

Mumford thinks that such perceptions of absences  can be adequately explained by an “evolutionary  

useful non-rational [mental] mechanism.” It  is non-rational in the sense that it is not  

a result of an inferential mental calculation  since our phenomenal perceptual experience of  

such absences tends to be immediate, not requiring  a deliberate cognition. It is evolutionary useful  

because to perceive a lack of something can be  life-preserving, for instance if we perceive a  

lack of ground that prevents us from walking over  a cliff. We perceive an absence intuitively not  

because absences have actuality but because of  an evolutionary benefit. Negative properties are  

hence in that way useful but are dispensable  since it can be explained by appealing to an  

evolutionary response rather than an ontology. First Conclusion: The Emptiness of Emptiness 

With the devices of denial, the evolutionarily  conditioned perception of absence and a  

fictionalist theory of empty reference, Mumford  thinks we can now explain how something is not,  

without ontologically committing to its existence.  His solution is epistemological and linguistic.  

It is understandably not ontological since he in  fact denies the actuality of the non-existent. He  

has shown that negative entities are reducible  to positive ones, and that they are also not  

indispensable to our best possible theories. Negations can be reduced to denials and absences  

have no causal power but only explanatory power  in the same way that denials work. For instance  

a lack of water caused my plant to die but  it is not absence that is in fact causal. It  

is the presence of water that causes a plant to  live. Likewise, omissions require positive hosts,  

where they can be accounted for by denying the  presence of the positive host. On totality,  

“we need not assert that there are no more  (first-order) facts when we want to total some set  

of facts. We can deny that there are more facts,  which needs nothing in the world to make it true.” 

Because of this inversion, there are then  different types of nothings. The absence  

of hair in a bald person is different  from the absence of water for the plants.  

They deny different things and hence require  differing explanations as he had given them.  

He concludes that “negativity is […] not a  feature of the world itself but a feature of  

the way we think and talk about the world.” It  has “good sense on its side. What-is-not has no  

existence. It is not part of what is. […] But  it is clear that we can and do talk about what  

there is not.” Counter 

What Mumford had done in his book was to examine  various types of nothings but Heidegger may accuse  

him as he did philosophers sans the Pre-Socratics  such as Parmenides for tackling nothings and not  

the Nothing. What Heidegger does say is that  the field of metaphysics was concerning itself  

not with its raison d’etre which is to tackle  the nature of Being and not beings. Heidegger  

even tried to go from the study of the ontology  of “das Nichts,” the Nothing, to then use it  

to examine all metaphysics. Beings and Being  qua Being are not the same thing. Similarly,  

I want to argue that nothings and the Nothing qua  Nothingness are not the same. Mumford’s analysis  

works well if what is required is a contrast  between beings and nothings. The expressions of  

negative entities in terms of positive entities  work if there are positive entities acting as  

hosts, contrasts and conceptual foils but the  Nothing qua Nothingness cannot be resolved via  

a contrast with beings or even Being qua Being. Mumford’s analysis already require a world of  

beings by which the contrast with nothings and  negation is needed to describe non-entities  

such as boundaries, holes, shadows, negative  properties and absences of beings. It makes an  

unspoken cosmological assumption that at first,  there was already something, from which things  

can then develop from. This is not an unreasonable  assumption. It is a creatio ex materia and in fact  

is what the Big Bang theory posits. All matter  and energy was compressed into a hyper-dense  

hyper-tiny point from which cosmic inflation began  from. The theory is unable to explain how the  

matter and energy got there. Like the non-cyclical  versions of the Big Bang theory, cyclical theories  

where each Big Bang ends with a Big Crunch  which then rebounds to a new Big Bang also  

sidesteps this problem. Matter and energy were  basically already all existent as a brute fact. 

In such a cosmology, Mumford’s analysis is  suitable since the Nothing is nothing, that is,  

it does not exist. There never was a state of  absolute nothingness. This assumption may be  

correct. We currently do not know and may never  be able to find out definitively either since our  

best science at least for the moment, general  relativity and quantum theory, is unable to  

peek past the moment of the Big Bang. We do have  theories but with no real way of proving them,  

hence making them merely speculation, not that  there is anything wrong with speculation per se.  

I have discussed this in my book-length  Metaphysical Investigations. 

Creatio ex Nihilo In that essay, I discussed  

creatio ex materia but was more intrigued by  creatio ex nihilo, or how something can come  

from nothing or more precisely the Nothing.  Creatio ex nihilo, like creatio ex materia,  

is a hypothesis. The nihilo in such a creatio is  however a true Nothingness, as close to a complete  

void as it actually can be. It is not a negative  entity that subsists due to a positive host entity  

because at first, in such an empty universe,  there was actually only nothing. However, because  

we live currently in a universe of at least some  things, we know that if indeed the starting point  

was the Nothing, somehow from it must emerge  something. This is known in the literature as  

the Anthropic Principle, where theories on the  development of the universe must be consistent  

with the universe as it currently is, one  capable of developing observers such as us. 

Note that we are talking about the universe  here. The universe is the totality of all worlds,  

the entirety of all there is and if Sartre’s  second definition of totality of the ancient  

Greeks is correct, also of the Nothing surrounding  all worlds. Since the universe is all there is,  

then this universe was at first empty. There is  no outside where some thing can arrive from. The  

universe is the totality, of which there is no  outside. Hence if we want to persist on such a  

path of enquiry, we cannot depend on a deus ex  machina to provide the answer. If a deus is in  

this primordial universe, then it is not empty.  This deus cannot also be outside the universe,  

since the universe is already the totality of  all things. Even if he resides on a transcendent  

level, this transcendent level is part of the  universe as per definition. Our theory will  

have to depend on no outside help since there is  no outside and no materia since there is none. 

How then can something come from the Nothing? This  is one of the great questions of philosophy. The  

Tao Te Ching was written around 500 BCE and at  that time, Laozi already thought of the emptiness  

of the Dao as the origin of all, as the deepest of  mysteries. Today, 2,500 years later, it remains a  

mystery, despite attempts by the best thinkers to  explain it. I want to suggest that about 100 years  

ago, we finally had a scientific breakthrough  that can throw some light on the matter,  

and that is quantum theory. The Unprecedented Void 

In the introduction to this essay, I had talked  about how the Void as described through quantum  

theory is not a space devoid of absolutely  anything. It is instead awash in quantum  

fields. Is this move cheating or a sleight of hand  where the Nothing is in fact not really empty at  

all? Perhaps. But we should consider whether our  expectations of the Void as a space containing  

nothing are misplaced. In the Void, there may  not be any matter and energy but should for  

instance the laws of logic apply? How about the  laws of mathematics or physics? How about ideas,  

numbers or information? Can they exist in the  Void? Because these laws and items are abstract,  

they do not depend on material entities to  stand. Some of them, the laws of logic and  

mathematics for instance, are a priori,  meaning they do not rely on empirical  

verification to ascertain their truth. They  are simply true. Hence there does not seem  

to be any principled reason why these laws  and abstract items cannot exist in the Void,  

though they may not. The point is that the Void  does not have to truly devoid of everything. I am  

using the word ‘thing’ to encompass not just  material things but also immaterial things. 

I want to compare this with how early experiments  on vacuums surprised the scientists then. The  

fact that light can travel through a vacuum  is not something taken for granted by them.  

The prevailing idea then was that a physical  medium is required to transmit energy which was  

why the all-pervasive ether was proposed.  Light was considered to be composed of  

particles and yet these particles managed  to traverse a space evacuated of any medium,  

while sound is unable to. Will light be  able to traverse our hypothetical Void?  

For that matter, is the vacuum really a portable  Void? Arguably, it is not. Electromagnetic waves  

can pass through and is within the vacuum, such  waves being energy. The Void by contrast is a  

primordial state where there is presumably not  only no matter but also no energy within it. 

To even talk of within and outside the Void  is also misleading. A vacuum is contained by  

its walls, such as in a vacuum tube or a thermos  flask. The Void has no walls. Because our universe  

contains nothing, the Void will extend infinitely  since there is nothing for it to be limited or  

contained by. It will be dark and cold within  it since there is no energy and hence no light,  

and cold since temperature is a proxy of  the vibration of atoms and molecules of  

which there is none. Hence its condition will  be one of complete darkness and a temperature  

of absolute zero, that is, zero Kelvins. How about space-time? Is there space,  

time or space-time in the Void? General relativity  tells us that space-time only unfolds with the  

cosmic inflation of the Big Bang. Because all  matter and energy was contained in a hyper-dense  

and hyper-tiny point, the force of gravity was  so intense that space-time was so tightly curved  

that it formed only an infinitesimal point.  Space-time hence seems to only emerge with  

the emergence of matter and energy. Since the  Void has no matter and energy ex hypothesi,  

there should hence be no space-time whatsoever in  it. With no matter, no energy and no space-time,  

how can the Void kickstart the Beginning? Quantum theory tells us that virtual particles  

can emerge in a vacuum due to the fluctuations and  interactions of the various quantum fields present  

in the space of the vacuum. In a volume with  matter reduced to a temperature of absolute zero,  

the particles there will still have some motion  since to the extent that their position is  

certain, their momentum will be uncertain  given Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.  

The question we have to answer is whether  quantum theory is operative in the Void. More  

specifically, does Heisenberg’s Uncertainty  Principle? Recall that the principle is a  

consequence of the wave-particle duality of  matter. Position and momentum, time and energy  

are the two pairs that have been specifically  explicated by Heisenberg for the principle to  

apply to. The shorter the time frame, the more  uncertainty the level of energy within the  

space. However, if there is no space whatsoever  anywhere in the universe since space-time has not  

yet unfolded or rather is non-existent,  does the Uncertainty Principle apply? 

Asking about the Void is often compared  to asking what is north of the North Pole.  

The latter question is inadmissible because  Earth is a sphere and so there is nothing of  

Earth further north of its North Pole. However,  the geometry of the Void is not known and hence  

is a fortiori not known to be spherical. My  purpose in raising all these is to say that the  

various situations are not comparable to that  of the Void. The absolute Nothingness or Void  

of the primordial universe prior to the creatio  events does not have any current instances in the  

universe and perhaps not even any close analogues.  Vacuums have walls, black holes have mass and both  

have energy within them. Empty spaces in outer  space likewise have energy coursing through them.  

Perhaps a large vacuum can be built, with  walls far apart such that the space in its  

middle approximates a wall-less vacuum. It can be  shrouded in complete darkness with electromagnetic  

shields like a Faraday’s cage to prevent  electromagnetic waves from entering and cooled to  

a temperature of absolute zero, but even in such a  vacuum, we cannot remove the space-time within it.  

Hence the Void is unprecedented. We are  unable to replicate it and we will also  

never experience it in its primal state. Yet if we are to answer how we can go  

from the state of the Void to  our current universe-of-things,  

our theory will need to explain how  the Nothing can manifest something.  

The Nothing will itself have to already possess  some characteristics to make this transition  

possible. For the Void to be able to manifest  virtual particles which can later consolidate  

to form actual particles, quantum theory needs to  be operative. For quantum theory to be operative,  

we need quantum fields to be present. For quantum  fields to be present, we need space-time. And yet  

according to the Big Bang theory and general  relativity, space-time was so tightly curved as  

to be only a point at the moment of the Big Bang.  Space-time only unfolded as a result of the cosmic  

inflation which was caused by the Big Bang. But  without space-time, there are no quantum fields,  

since quantum fields is a property of space. General Solution with Higher  

and Regular Dimensions For quantum fields to be in the Void,  

we need the Void to have space. But since the  concept of absolute space has been debunked  

leaving us only with relative space which itself  is a result of mass-energy in general relativity,  

we have a paradox. One way to resolve this  paradox is to reconcile general relativity  

with quantum theory to get a theory of quantum  gravity. Brane theory, string theory and M-theory  

are some of the leading contenders for such  a ‘theory of everything.’ They posit extra  

dimensions of space and I want to make use of  this suggestion to propose an idea as follows.  

It is only an idea since it will require  further development to become a theory proper. 

Its fundamental premise is that the primordial  universe has more dimensions than the three  

spatial and one time dimensions we are used  to. Let us call the latter four dimensions  

of space-time ‘regular dimensions’ and the  additional dimensions ‘higher dimensions.’ A space  

with all the dimensions is known as the ‘bulk’ or  ‘hyperspace’ in brane theory. Prior to there being  

any matter and energy in the universe, the bulk  was there, in the form of the Void. As earlier  

noted, the Void must still obey certain principles  such as the laws of logic and physics like the  

Principle of Conservation of Mass-Energy. There  is no matter and energy in the Void, and hence it  

remains in the equilibrium of dark absolute zero. The Void is a hyperspace with all the dimensions,  

both higher and regular. Since it is a space,  it is awash with quantum fields. Why? Because  

quantum fields are intrinsic properties of space.  If there is space, there are quantum fields.  

It is what space is. What are fields? A field  is a continuous manifold in space where each  

point in this manifold has a value of what  it is a field of. If it is a magnetic field,  

then each point of this magnetic field has a  value of magnetism. If it is an electric field,  

then each point of this electric field has a value  of electric charge. I am not suggesting however  

that the Void has magnetic or electric fields,  they are only chosen to illustrate what fields  

are because they are familiar phenomena. Instead,  the space of the Void has only quantum fields. 

A field in equilibrium in the Void may have at  every single point a value of zero, which means  

that whatever quantity of that type of field is  conserved and equal to zero. However, conservation  

and equilibrium still holds so long as the vector  value of all points in the field sums to zero.  

Hence, one point can have a value  of say 1 pointing in one direction,  

and another point in the hyperspace a value  of say -1 pointing in the opposite direction,  

and there is still equilibrium and conservation of  that field’s quantity which sums to zero. Hence,  

the field at a given point can fluctuate away from  zero so long as it has a counterpart at another  

point with the opposite value and direction. The fluctuations and interactions of the various  

fields can give rise to pairs of virtual particles  for brief periods, which mean that there is a  

particle and an anti-particle of the same type  generated. The particle and the anti-particle  

are then attracted to each other due to their  opposing charge and often mutually annihilate,  

returning the space to the state of the Void  (A, ~A, B, ~B  A + ~A, B + ~B  0). Energy  

and mass remains conserved throughout.  In my Metaphysical Investigations essay,  

I have proposed two potential mechanisms by  which virtual particles can become actual  

particles through separation while still  obeying mass-energy conservation. They are:

1) A wall of virtual particles springing up  between the components of an earlier pair,  

separating them permanently. 

A, ~A  A | B, ~B | C, ~C |  D, ~D, … | ~A  A |||…||| ~A.

2) A reaction between components of different  pairs leading to new compound particles that  

are unreactive with the original components. A, ~A, B, ~B  A + B, ~A, ~B  AB, ~A, ~B.  

Disappearance of Higher Dimensions From there, the primordial universe is on its way  

to become a universe-of-things. The task of this  essay is complete, which is to propose a plausible  

way of how the Nothing can generate something  but perhaps I should also explain how this sparse  

universe develops to the stage of the Big Bang.  The early actual particles continue forming out  

of virtual particles via the mechanisms and these  fundamental particles consolidate to progressively  

become protons, neutrons, atoms, molecules, stars,  planets, galaxies and so on, becoming more and  

more massive until they collapse on themselves,  which will be our first Big Crunch, where all  

the masses and energy get compressed into a  hyper-dense, hyper-tiny space of a singularity,  

which then rebounds to give the Big Bang. Since my aim in this essay is about the Nothing,  

I will not attempt to grapple with  the cause of the Big Bang. As noted,  

the Big Bang theory presupposes materia and so  does not deal with creatio ex nihilo. However, for  

the sake of completeness, we can note that there  are theories on how and why the singularity led to  

the Big Bang, from the collision of different  branes to an instability of the highly-dense  

singularity and the mutual repulsion of the  masses within it, a repulsive gravity as opposed  

to the usual attractive force of gravity between  masses. Others profess an agnosticism, while the  

Big Bang theory itself only hypothesises what  happens after the Bang and not what caused it. 

Recall that the pre-Big Crunch universe is  in hyperspace, a space with both higher and  

regular dimensions. Yet, why is it  that the post-Big Bang universe has  

only seemingly the four ‘regular’ ones? We know  from general relativity that at the singularity,  

all the mass and energy is concentrated into a  point. Because mass-energy deforms the geometry  

of space-time, this hyper-dense singularity  causes space-time to curve so tightly that it  

is effectively reduced to that point also. Note  that a point has a geometry of zero dimensions.  

Then when the Big Bang happens and  the cosmos inflates, only four regular  

dimensions unfold. What happened to the higher  dimensions? There are a few possibilities:

1) They are still there. The singularity sits  in a space of only the higher dimensions. The  

higher dimensions are not susceptible to the  gravitational attraction of mass-energy and  

remain as they are. The four regular dimensions  get folded into the singularity and then expand  

out upon the Big Bang, returning all  dimensions to hyperspace. However,  

we are unable to detect the higher dimensions  despite their large potentially infinite sizes  

because we are four-dimensional beings, the  limitations of our sensory apparatus or both. 

2) All dimensions are folded into the  singularity and in the subsequent Big  

Bang expansion, only the four regular  dimensions get unfolded. The higher  

dimensions remain tightly curved in  this new geometry of the universe.

One way to imagine how the number of  dimensions can be reduced is to imagine  

compressing a block of aluminium. The block is  three-dimensional. When intensely compressed,  

say as tight as a singularity, it is  reduced to a point which if dense enough  

is zero-dimensional. Then depending on how  we unfold the now hyper-dense point, we can

1) unfold it in a line which will  be one-dimensional (really three,  

but with a narrow height and thickness), 2) unfold it into a sheet like aluminium  

foil which is two-dimensional (really  three, but with a narrow height) or 

3) unfold it into a block  which is three-dimensional,

the point being that it is possible to  reduce the number of dimensions of an object. 

Special Solution with Only Regular Dimensions There is another possible solution that follows  

the general scheme of my idea. This solution  assumes that there are only the four regular  

dimensions, three of space and one of time.  The Void has these and only these dimensions.  

Quantum fields are awash in them because it  is the nature of space that it contains and is  

pervaded by quantum fields. Virtual particles  hence can form leading to actual particles,  

which then lead to protons, neutrons, atoms,  molecules, stars, planets, galaxies and so on,  

becoming more and more massive until they  collapse on themselves. This will be our  

first Big Crunch, where all the masses and  energy get compressed into a hyper-dense,  

hyper-tiny space of a singularity, which  then rebounds to give the Big Bang.  

During the Big Crunch, the regular dimensions  which are space-time become increasingly curved  

due to increasing gravity as all matter-energy  become increasingly compressed, finally into  

a singularity. Upon the Big Bang and its cosmic  inflation, the regular dimensions get unfolded. 

This second solution with only regular dimensions  is less general than the first solution with both  

higher and regular dimensions. Since the best  theories currently for quantum gravity require  

higher dimensions, I devised the more general  solution. Both solutions are driven by a need  

to explain how space is primordially present in  the Void since we need space in order to have  

quantum fields. The solution that is less general  is a reduction of the general solution with number  

of higher dimensions = 0 or number of dimensions  = 4, and hence can be considered special compared  

to the general solution, using the same  parlance as special and general relativity. 

Final Conclusion: The Plenitude of the Nothing The cosmology proposed in the latter half of this  

essay presumes a creatio ex nihilo. Hence,  the universe was at first a Void. The Void  

is unprecedented, only weakly comparable  to vacuums or states of empty space.  

It leads to a first universe-of-things, which  ends in a Big Crunch, resulting in a singularity,  

which then rebounds into a Big Bang. My  proposed solutions use quantum theory. However,  

quantum fields are only present if space already  exists. Because general relativity teaches that  

the Big Bang singularity is so dense that  space-time becomes so tightly curved as to  

form only a point which unfolds upon cosmic  inflation, it will seem that space-time did  

not precede the Big Bang. I propose a  way out by leveraging higher dimensions,  

which are an integral part of Brane, String and  M-theory, the leading ‘theories of everything.’  

It is a general solution but if it is later  shown that higher dimensions do not exist,  

the general solution simply reduces to the special  solution which uses only the regular dimensions. 

While speculative, if right, it will explain  how from the Nothing can come something. The  

Nothing can really then be the source of  everything. We can finally understand how,  

as expressed by the Dao, the Nothing is a space  which is empty of stuff but full of possibilities.