The Book of Nothing John D Barrow, review Pat Boran

The Book of Nothing. John D Barrow. Cape.

(Sunday Business Post, November, 2000)

According to Shakespeare's Lear, 'Nothing will come of nothing,' and the play which bears his name itself might be described as much ado about the nothing the senile king receives in return for love. Then again, according to tennis players at least, love and nothing are already one and the same.

John D Barrow's thoroughly fascinating Book of Nothing opens in somewhat similar fashion to this review, in that it refreshes a passing familiarity with Nothing, reminding us at once that we 'ain't seen nothing yet' and that, as John Lennon had it in a wonderful double entendre, 'Nothing is real.'

From such playful attempts to conjure nothingness, the book plunges into the literary abyss, the scientific vacuum and the mathematical zero showing that all three versions of nothingness have a history and a troubled evolution and that, far from being the same the world over, Nothing has been many things to many people.

For most, nothing is something to fear, the vacuum which Nature is said to abhor. And in this part of the world at least, that fear owes much to St. Augustine. For the Jews, nothingness had been a state that God 'had acted to do away with', so though it was a place of absence there was no suggestion that it was evil. For Augustine, however, the very idea of nothingness, a state without God, was not just unthinkable but anti-God.

In much of the east, meanwhile, both middle and near, nothingness was seen as full of possibility, of promise. The contemplation of nothingness was, in fact, a way towards an understanding of the universe. The east and west on yet another front were split or, as Barrow puts it here, 'Moslems celebrated infinity where the Greeks feared it.'

But just as Plato had made nothingness impossible, believing our world to be modelled on an ideal if invisible other, Augustine and his followers shut off the investigation of nothingness for hundreds of years.

Despite many reasonable contributions to the debate, such as the French Bishop Etienne Tempie suggestion that God, being all powerful, could surely make anything (including Nothing) exist, in time the mere mention of the vacuum became tantamount to heresy.

But science has a way of making some questions unavoidable. Plato may have insisted that Nothing does not exist but there was still the complementary question: Does something not exist? It might have sounded like word games but Nothing would not go away. Or, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it during the course of his Being and Nothingness, a 600-page monster on the subject, 'Nothingness haunts being'.

Nothingness also haunts the cosmic and particle physics of the last hundred years, just as the vacuum haunted the science of earlier centuries. Following Heisenberg's assertion (his 1927 Uncertainty Principle) that there were limits to the information we could have about any given system, it became impossible to assert the existence of a total vacuum. For many, work on the vacuum became, as it were, a waste of space.

Where Newton had imagined an ether through which things moved, Einstein himself had clung to his 'cosmological constant' until forced to abandon it by the logic of his own discoveries. Nothingness started to look fairly empty again. For the time being.

Part of the difficulty with a subject like this is the English language, or language in general. We're not equipped to discuss nothingness in the way we're equipped to discuss things. The reader starts to wish someone had coined descriptive words for the many and varied kinds of nothingness, the 'many vacuums' of which some scientists now speak, in much the same way that descriptive properties such as 'spin', 'colour' and so on have been given to sub-atomic particles in other to particularise their behaviours.

Then again, maybe we get the kind of Nothing we expect, or deserve. The old Greek idea of the pneuma was an early version of the ether, itself an early version of Einstein's troubling constant, but whether the new image of the 'quantum vacuum' as 'elementary particles and their anti-particles appearing and disappearing' brings us closer to the something that is Nothing is still a moot point. As the Danish physicist Neils Bohr famously remarked: 'Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.'

Can nothing come of nothing? Can the universe suddenly begin and, if so, what precedes it? These questions may be unanswerable but they are far from pointless. John D Barrow has written a captivating book, full of passion, wonder and some admittedly challenging science, but a book which, like a mandala, reminds us that the contemplation of Nothing can reveal to us a great deal about the universe, and about ourselves.