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…
