Posted: Apr 25, 2012 2:05 pm
Teuton wrote:Matt_B wrote:
Given that the whole point of the book is that the idea of "nothing" as being an absence of "something" has no basis in physics, I'd think a little poetic licence is forgiveable.
Of course, there can be no physics of nothingness, since nothingness is nothing physical (nor anything nonphysical).
Nothingness, the nothing (* is the absence of being—end of story. It is not what Krauss thinks it is!
(* I hate it when "nothing" is used as a noun rather than as an indefinite pronoun without being combined with the definite or indefinite article.)
You can strop all you like about it, but when dictionary definitions and common usage have the word used in a multitude of different contexts - including ones Krauss deals with in the book such as empty space, or the state of the universe prior to the big bang - I'd think that's something you're just going to have to get used to.
I guess we've had all this before with Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained. In both cases you'd have to be taking the author perversely literally to expect them to be answering questions that are, by their philosophical definitions, unanswerable rather than saying how scientific developments have largely sidestepped them to produce practical answers to better formulated questions.