The Book of Nothing by John Barrow, Jonathan Cape, £16.99, ISBN
0224059629
WE REALLY don’t know whether nature abhors a vacuum. But humans, at least
those who inquire into nature in the Western tradition, clearly do. They have
ignored nothingness, or denied it. They have filled it with various “ethers”.
Now we have the quantum vacuum, seething with virtual particles—and maybe
with baby universes.
“The logic of the Greeks prevents them having the idea [of Nothing] at all,”
John Barrow writes in introducing The Book of Nothing. He continues
with an entertaining and informative account of how the zero came into being in
ancient civilisations such as the Babylonian and Egyptian.
Advertisement
This book may represent the attraction of opposites: Barrow’s earlier book
Theories of Everything tackled the notion that the entire Universe
could be explained, modelled and understood through a grand unifying theory. And
as a distinguished mathematical physicist and Cambridge professor, Barrow takes
seriously the need to communicate to a wide audience what it is that he and his
ilk do. Nothing is central to that.
He has done his reading on how people have thought about these issues in the
past. One solution to nature abhorring a vacuum was that space was filled with
ethers, which performed all sorts of useful functions in the physical world. As
Barrow rightly points out, Isaac Newton apparently killed off the ether (or at
least the Cartesian version of it).
Voltaire famously wrote home to France while in exile in London, saying that
space in Paris was full of fluids but entirely empty in London. This is as
strong a statement as we can get of the contingency of scientific
knowledge—the point that science and its findings are part of history, not
on some other plane.
I’m not so happy about Barrow’s discussion of nothing and the 19th century.
His discussion of the work of George FitzGerald, Hendrik Lorenz, Albert Einstein
and others at the end of that century and the beginning of the 20th are fine.
But he more or less completely ignores the work done during the first seventy or
so years of the 19th century.
Perhaps Barrow was pursuing a story of progress—in which science forges
ineluctably on toward what we know at the moment. The re-emergence of the ether
in the early 19th century is clearly a difficulty for that view.
He cites the 19th century philosopher William Whewell as adopting the theory
of the 17th century natural philosopher Christiaan Huygens in his work on the
ether. Yet the most cursory glance at Whewell’s work shows that he was the
champion of the wave theory of light proposed by Augustin Fresnel in the
1820s—and that required an elastic solid ether to transmit transverse
light waves.
Barrow makes no mention either of scientists, such as Faraday, who were not
happy with the new ether theories and proposed instead a field
theory—productively taken up by Lord Kelvin and by James Clerk Maxwell.
These lacunae seem to me to be a serious flaw in the book. When Barrow returns
to the present, he guides us gracefully through topics such as the creation of
the Universe (matter from nothing, really) and the possibility of the existence
of multiple universes.
He makes frequent references to the Judaeo-Christian tradition of
creation—which I found puzzling, especially when he writes about
gnosticism. Is he trying to understand the world views of the past, or in some
sense trying to write about his own beliefs, or exploring just to make up his
mind? Despite these tantalising questions—and that bit of confusion in the
1800s—I am happy to report that nothing is full of interesting
reading.
