Nothing is a concept that describes the lack or absence of anything at all. Colloquially, the concept is often used to indicate the lack of anything relevant or significant, or to describe a particularly unimpressive thing, event, or object. It is contrasted with something and everything. " Something " is a single released by The Beatles in 1969 and featured on the album Abbey Road. Everything is the concept of all that exists Every Entity, Physical body, and Abstract object is part of everything There is also the concept in Eastern philosophy which is called 'nothingness' It is characterized by an egoless state of being, in which one can see the true relation of one's own small part in the cosmos.

Language and logic

Grammatically, the word "nothing" is an indefinite pronoun, which means that it refers to something. An indefinite pronoun is a Pronoun that refers to one or more unspecified beings objects or places This can lead to confusion, "Nothing" is a concept, concepts are things, so the concept of "Nothing" is a thing. This fallacy is neatly demonstrated by the old joke, if nothing is worse than the Devil, and nothing is greater than God, then the Devil must be greater than God:

Devil > (nothing), (nothing) > God

Devil > (nothing) > God

Devil > God

The simplest meaning is: no thing. The Devil is the God is the principal or sole Deity in Religions and other belief systems that worship one deity. So if "Nothing" is said to be in a particular place, have a particular quality, then it is meant that "no thing" is there, or has this or that quality. The word "naught" also has this same meaning.

Clauses can often be restated to avoid the appearance that "nothing" possesses an attribute: "There is nothing in the basement" can be restated as "There is not one thing in the basement". "Nothing is missing" can be restated as "everything is present". Conversely, many fallacious conclusions follow from treating "nothing" as a noun.

Modern logic made it possible to articulate these points coherently as intended, and many philosophers hold that the word "nothing" does not function as a noun: there is not any object it refers to. Logic is the study of the principles of valid demonstration and Inference. There are still various opposing views, though: that, for example, our understanding of the world rests essentially on noticing absences and lacks as well as presences, and that "nothing" and related words serve to indicate these.

Philosophy

The concept of 'nothing' has been studied throughout history by philosophers and theologians; many have found that careful consideration of the notion can easily lead to the logical fallacy of reification. Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence knowledge truth beauty justice validity mind and language Theology is the study of a god or the gods from a religious perspective Reification (also known as hypostatisation or concretism) is a Fallacy of Ambiguity, when an Abstraction (abstract Belief (If one does not believe that nothing is no thing. ) However, many of the existentialist and postmodern philosophers and writers would argue that Nothing is actually the lack or absence of something, rather than of anything. Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine which posits that individuals create the meaning and essence of their lives and that this essence follows from their existence Postmodernism literally means 'after the modernist movement' While " Modern " itself refers to something "related to the present" the movement of modernism

The understanding of 'nothing' varies widely between cultures, especially between Western and Eastern cultures and philosophical traditions. For instance, Shunyata (emptiness), unlike "nothingness", is considered a state of mind in some forms of Buddhism (see Nirvana, mu, and Bodhi. MIND ( Moving In New Directions) (est 1975 is an alternative education high school in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Buddhism is a family of beliefs and practices In sramanic philosophy Nirvana (निर्वाण| Nirvāṇa; निब्बान Nibbāna; Prakrit: णिव्वाण Mu ( Japanese / Korean) and Wu ( Chinese traditional 無, simplified 无 Pinyin: wú Jyutping Bodhi (बोधि is both the Pāli and Sanskrit word traditionally translated into English as "enlightenment See also soku hi in Kyoto school). soku hi means "is or is not" The logic of soku hi or "is and is not" represents a balanced logic of symbolization reflecting sensitivity to the mutual determination The Kyoto School is the name given to the Japanese "philosophical movement centered at Kyoto University that assimilated Western philosophy and religious Achieving 'nothing' as a state of mind in this tradition allows someone to be totally 'focused' (in the Western sense of the word) on a thought or activity at a level of intensity they would not be able to achieve if they were 'consciously' thinking. Consciousness has been defined loosely as a constellation of attributes of Mind such as Subjectivity, Self-awareness, Sentience, and the The classic example of this is an archer drawing a bow, attempting to erase his mind as a way to better focus on the shot. Existentialism and Martin Heidegger have brought these two understandings closer together. Martin Heidegger ( September 26, 1889 &ndash May 26, 1976) (ˈmaɐ̯tiːn ˈhaɪ̯dɛgɐ was an influential German philosopher

Science

In mathematics, nothing does not have a technical meaning. Mathematics is the body of Knowledge and Academic discipline that studies such concepts as Quantity, Structure, Space and It could be said that a set contains "nothing" if and only if it is the empty set, in which case its cardinality (or size) is zero. ↔ In Mathematics, and more specifically Set theory, the empty set is the unique set having no ( Zero) members In Mathematics, the cardinality of a set is a measure of the "number of elements of the set" In mathematics the dimension of a Space is roughly defined as the minimum number of Coordinates needed to specify every point within it In other words, the word "nothing" is an informal term for an empty set. In Mathematics, and more specifically Set theory, the empty set is the unique set having no ( Zero) members However, since two minus two is also called nothing, it could also refer to the number zero. Subtraction is one of the four basic Arithmetic operations it is the inverse of Addition, meaning that if we start with any number and add any number and then subtract

In physics, the word nothing is not used in any technical sense. Physics (Greek Physis - φύσις in everyday terms is the Science of Matter and its motion. A region of space is called a vacuum if it does not contain any matter. This vacuum means "absence of matter" or "an empty area or space" for the cleaning appliance see Vacuum cleaner. Matter is commonly defined as being anything that has mass and that takes up space. But it can contain physical fields. In Physics, a field is a Physical quantity associated to each point of Spacetime. In fact, it is practically impossible to construct a region of space which contains no matter or fields, since gravity cannot be blocked and all objects at a non-zero temperature radiate electromagnetically. Absolute zero is the point at which molecules do not move (relative to the rest of the body more than they are required to by a quantum mechanical effect called Zero-point Electromagnetic radiation takes the form of self-propagating Waves in a Vacuum or in Matter. However, supposing such a region existed, it would still not be "nothing", since it has properties and a measurable existence as part of the quantum-mechanical vacuum. This vacuum means "absence of matter" or "an empty area or space" for the cleaning appliance see Vacuum cleaner.

In computing, "Nothing" (VB.Net), or "null" (Java, C#, others), can be a keyword used to represent an unassigned variable, or a pointer that does not point to any particular memory address, or a reference that does not refer to an extant object. Computing is usually defined like the activity of using and developing Computer technology Computer hardware and software. Visual Basic.NET ( VBNET) is an object-oriented Computer language that can be viewed as an evolution of Microsoft's Visual Basic Java (Jawa is an Island of Indonesia and the site of its Capital city Jakarta. C# (pronounced C Sharp is a Multi-paradigm A variable (ˈvɛərɪəbl is an Attribute of a physical or an abstract System which may change its Value while it is under Observation. In Computer science, a memory address is an identifier for a memory location at which a Computer program or a hardware device can store a piece of data In Computer science, a reference is an object containing information which refers to data stored elsewhere as opposed to containing the data itself Similarly, Null is used in SQL as a symbolic representation of the absence of data. This meta-data usage of "null" is different from the unprintable ASCII and unicode null character, which has a numerical value of zero — although it is different from the ASCII character for zero ("0"). Metadata ( meta data, or sometimes metainformation) is "data about data" of any sort in any media American Standard Code for Information Interchange ( ASCII) In Computing, Unicode is an Industry standard allowing Computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's The null character (also null terminator) is a character with the value zero present in the ASCII and Unicode character sets and available The ASCII blank character (" ") is not the same as an empty string (""), which is itself sometimes confused with the null pointer in languages such as C. In Computer programming and some branches of Mathematics, a string is an ordered Sequence of Symbols. tags please moot on the talk page first! --> In Computing, C is a general-purpose cross-platform block structured Most forms of assembly language have a no-operation (nop) instruction (often with a numerical value of zero) — that is, a command to do nothing, which can prove useful for blanking out areas of problem code. See the terminology section below for information regarding inconsistent use of the terms assembly and assembler In Computer science NOP or NOOP (short for N o OP eration) is an Assembly language instruction sequence of programming

See also

Further reading

• The Book of Nothing, John D Barrow
• Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre
• The Nothing That Is, Robert Kaplan
• In Search of a Cyclops, Fredrick Schermer
• Zero, Charles Seife
• The Hole in the Universe K. In Mathematics, and more specifically Set theory, the empty set is the unique set having no ( Zero) members Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine which posits that individuals create the meaning and essence of their lives and that this essence follows from their existence The Latin phrase ex nihilo means "out of nothing" It often appears in conjunction with the concept of Creation, as in creatio ex nihilo Everything is the concept of all that exists Every Entity, Physical body, and Abstract object is part of everything In Quantum field theory, a false vacuum is a Metastable sector of Space which appears to be a perturbative vacuum but is unstable to Instanton Negative theology - also known as the Via Negativa ( Latin for "Negative Way" and Apophatic theology - is a Theology that Nihilism (from the Latin nihil, nothing is a philosophical position that argues that Existence is without objective meaning Purpose No is an English / Old English word indicating Rejection, Disagreement, Refusal or making a negative response or exclamation Nothing comes from nothing is a philosophical expression of a thesis first argued by Parmenides, often stated in its Latin form Ex nihilo nihil In Computer science NOP or NOOP (short for N o OP eration) is an Assembly language instruction sequence of programming A vacuous truth is a truth that is devoid of content because it asserts something about all members of a class that is empty or because it says "If  A  then  This vacuum means "absence of matter" or "an empty area or space" for the cleaning appliance see Vacuum cleaner. John David Barrow FRS (born November 29, 1952, London) is an English cosmologist, theoretical physicist, and Being and Nothingness An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology ( French: L'Être et le néant: Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique) sometimes subtitled Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905 &ndash 15 April 1980 commonly known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre (ʒɑ̃ pol saʁtʁə was a French C. Kole
• Church Dogmatics III/3, pp. 389-368, Karl Barth
• Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero, Brian Rotman
• Speech - Something About nothing, http://www.southperth.wa.gov.au/media_releases/docs/2007/July/MR%20Speaking%20with%20Conf.pdf

References