Nothing

Catalog description

How can a course be about nothing? How can anything be about nothing? We all use the word "nothing" (probably several times a day) without hesitation, but if we stopped to think about its meaning, we would realize that "nothing" is a complex, multi-faceted, ever-changing concept. To talk about "nothing," we need to first set rules and boundaries. This course explores the evolution of the concept of nothing in mathematics, philosophy and, especially, physics over the centuries. We will discuss the history of the concept of zero, ideas of nothing and everything in ancient philosophy, the concept of limit, which is at the heart of modern mathematics, and the theories of relativity and quantum physics, which represent the foundations of our modern understanding of the universe. We will ask age-old questions that have occupied natural philosophers for millennia: Why is there something rather than nothing? Where does everything come from? Can something come from nothing? What is nothing anyway? Along the way, we will see how developing scientific theories requires taking basic concepts---like the concept of "nothingness"---and making them precise enough to support scientific inquiry. We will discover that such a process can lead to a radical revision of basic concepts we might have thought were unambiguous.