Astronomy - June 2015

30 ASTRONOMY • JUNE 2015

Null and void

IF ASTRONOMY IS YOUR THING, it would appear

that you’re mostly in love with ... nothing.

The universe seems to be a huge ball of emptiness. Even

here on Earth, the richness around us is an illusion. Remove

all the unoccupied space within each atom, and the entire

human race would merely take up the volume of a sugar

cube. One cubic centimeter weighing 500 million tons.

Beyond Earth, space is less empty than atoms. Fanciful

sci-fi writers sometimes suggest that a solar system with

its orbiting planets is analogous to electrons whirling

around an atomic nucleus. It’s actually a bad metaphor.

Relative to the sizes of their components, atoms are 10

thousand times emptier than solar systems. Nonetheless,

between planets and stars, very little is discernible to our

eyes or telescopes.

Much ado about nothing

Figuring out the nature of space has obsessed humans

ever since the earliest written records of Homo Bewilderus.

The ancient Greeks, compulsive logicians, argued that the

blank-seeming sections of the universe couldn’t be empty

because nothingness cannot exist. They said that for space

to “be nothing” requires us to take the verb “to be” —

which means to exist — and then negate it. Being nothing,

they said, is a contradiction. It makes as much sense as say-

ing, “You’re running not running.”

Then came the church, which chanted “amen” to the “no

such thing as nothing” credo: If God is omnipresent, there

cannot be any vacuum. Added to all this, many 18th- and

then 19th-century scientists said that light is composed

Bob Berman is Astronomy’s “Strange Universe” columnist. His newest

book is ZOOM: How Everything Moves (Little, Brown and Company, 2014).

THINKSTOCK: CEMIL ADAKALE/HEMERA (EARTH), EDDTORO/ISTOCK (ASTRONAUT)