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I was going thru some back issues of Discover magazine and i read this article about what we don't know about ''nothing'' as i though i'd post it for those interested. For example ....
#1 states that 74% of the universe is nothing or dark energy, 22% is dark matter we cannot see and 4% is baryonic matter or stuff we can see.
or
#4 That even nothing has weight.The energy in dark matter is equivilent to a tiny mass as there is about one pound of dark energy in a cube of empty space 250,000 miles on each side.
I liked # 20 In other words, nothing could be the key to the theory of everything.
And I might add, it only takes two integers, 0 and 1 which represent nothing and something, to communicate any message regardless of its complexity; A color, an image, a moving image, a moving image with sound, a 3 dimensional moving image with sound or a simple LED on/off indicator.
It's the digital age. All digital communication is in ones and zeros.
The telegraph was a semi digital device. It sent messages by using on and off, but the coding was in the time pattern relationships between short and long on's.
From telegraphic codes, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was developed. In ASCII seven bits made up a word. Picture seven switches in a row. Each one can be either on or off (1 or 0). The number of possible combinations is 2 to the 7th power (2 possible states, 7 switches) or 128. Later, another bit was added to the word (Unicode Transformation Format, or UTF-8), making it 2 to the 8th power or 256 possible combinations in a word. In communicating text, multiple words (bytes) were sent down the line by a computer and received on the other end by a computer. Since the sending and receiving device speak the same language, the on/offs are interpreted on the other end as they were intended. Each word represents one letter of the alphabet. All of the letters of the alphabet plus other codes, characters and symbols were assigned their value in a table that is called the ASCII table. For instance the capital letter 'A' has a word that is binary 100 0001. The lower case 'a' has a word that is binary 110 0001.
Eight bits make one byte. Computers can use any word length. The most recognized are 8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit and 64 bit. 16 bit yields 65,536 possible combinations in one word. 32 bit yields 4,294,967,296 possible combinations. This is important because any scale of values can be assigned to a table and communicated in computer words; the rainbow of colors, spectrum of sound and on and on.
LOL! The author wrote about nothing. And I have to admit that I sometimes think about nothing as well. Okay, I'll toss my 2-cents out on the subject that may amount to nothing.
The concept of nothing isn't an easy thing to wrap your mind around. It also depends on what a person means by nothing. The article seems to be talking mostly about vacancy or voids within the space of the universe. Think about it. Even voids represent something. That's fine, but the context used by the author is not a complete definition, because there's also absolute nothingness. No particles, no antiparticles, no energy, no forces, no quarks, no waves, no quantum strings, no dimensions. It's the absolute absence of anything and everything.
That raises a major problem, because regardless of the fact we're composed entirely of stuff that are tiny non-physical blobs that vibrate and radiate energy, we and the rest of the universe are indeed here and we do indeed exist. So if we and the universe exist, how did it all come to exist? It's not a question of why - that's up to philosophers and theologists to figure out - it's about learning how the process works.
Can something just spark into existence from absolute nothing? I don't think so. There would have to be some kind of process involved to generate that spark in the first place. And that suggests there was something that existed before conditions formed that resulted with the Big Bang. What caused the Big Bang to happen?
It seems more likely that there was something around before the Big Bang rather than absolutely nothing. One scenario suggests it involves a collision or contact between at least two branes. These branes themselves might be the outermost edges of other universes, or perhaps layers of some unknown and weird forces and dimensions merging together.
It points to something at a smaller level, but that's vastly more expansive - the Planck level itself - which might fluctuate, constantly generating a quantum foam causing a wide variety of different universes to form and develop.
Of course, that too brings up more questions. If a quantum foam exists at the Planck level, is there anything smaller that makes all that up? It starts to look like everything that exists, no matter what it is or how small, may exist because of something even smaller. And that starts looking like some kind of infinite process of creating something from something, rather than something from nothing.
but the context used by the author is not a complete definition, because there's also absolute nothingness. No particles, no antiparticles, no energy, no forces, no quarks, no waves, no quantum strings, no dimensions. It's the absolute absence of anything and everything.
Where would we find ''absolute nothingness'' NightBazaar?
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