The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe (Vintage) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

The other half of this book is about philosophical issues such as the history of the concept of nothing and the number zero, the religious concepts of the history and future of the universe, and the mathematical history of zero and infinity.

As the previous reviews of this book, and indeed, its subtitle "Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe" imply, this should have been a book about Physics and in particular, the physics of vacuums (quantum zero-point energy). One would expect a detailed treatment of this, without the extensive digressions from the primary topic. If that is what you are expecting, you will be disappointed; it is why I rate this book three stars. I was bored by the parts of the book which digressed from the layman's physics discussion.

On the other hand, the half or perhaps 60% of the book Barrow devotes to discussion of physics was very well written. If you have read extensively other layman's books on physics (such as Greene's Elegant Universe, Treiman's Odd Quantum, Lederman's God Particle, and the like) then about a third or a half of this may seem familar, but restated in Barrow's clear descriptive prose. As for the rest, in about a decade of reading layman's physics books, I had not encountered - or had forgotten or previously misunderstood - the remainder. In this sense, the book is definitely worthy of five stars, and was very interesting. He explains, for the first time that I actually could understand the why of it rather than the fact of it's existence, the "why" of the unification of the three forces (excluding gravity) at high energies/temperatures, the "why" of black holes radiating away all their mass, and much of the "what" of Einstein's cosmological constant, which he calls the lambda force (as Einstein used the symbol lambda to represent it). Many other things are discussed along the way, and extensive notes for other reading are provided - many of which reference his own works.

In sum, I feel this book could have been shorter OR have expanded upon the physics at the expense of the philosophy and religious discussion. Of the 300 pages of prose (the remainder being extensive footnotes and index), be aware that perhaps only 150 or 170 will be of interest to those who want a solid physics discussion. If you have wider interests, the remainder will also likely be of interest; some of it can also be found in the earlier chapters of Gullburg's "Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers."

As quoted by Professor Barrow on page 8, this is a pun on what the Beatles had in mind, and is in essence what this book is all about. Nothing is real in the sense that it is no longer the nothing that it once was. It is actually "something." On the next page, to further illustrate the point, Barrow quotes the lyric from Freddie Mercury (of Queen), "Nothing really matters." It does indeed!

The impetus for this, Barrow's latest book on cosmology, seems to be the growing realization that the vacuum of space ("nothing") is not entirely empty, and in fact cannot in principle ever be empty. As Barrow explains in Chapter 7, "The Box that Can Never Be Empty," it would be a violation of the Uncertainty Principle because, "If we could say that there were no particles in a box, that it was completely empty of all mass and energy," we would have "perfect information about motion at every point and about the energy of the system at a given instant of time" (p. 204). This rather simple, but shocking revelation, has consequences that are shaking the very foundation of our understanding of the cosmos. Quite simply it appears that there is no such thing as nothing.

Barrow lays the ground work for this revelation by first exploring the nature of nothing as seen by the ancients, noting in particular the Greek abhorrence of the very idea that the vacuum could exist ("horror vacui"). In Chapter One, "Zero - The Whole Story," (which follows Chapter Nought) he recalls the history of zero and how it finally found acceptance. So great was the Greek horror of nothing that they did not have a zero in their number system. Many people found the idea of nothing and of zero frightening and impious. However, as Barrow shows, eventually zero triumphed over its adversaries because of its usefulness. In the next chapter, "Much Ado About Nothing," Barrow recalls the medieval debates about the vacuum, whether it exists, whether it existed before the creation of the world, and whether it was possible to create a vacuum. He recounts attempts to create a vacuum in Chapter Three, "Constructing Nothing," and then discusses the once and future ether that Einstein had so completely demolished. (It's back! But it's called the vacuum and it seems to have more properties than the old ether ever had.) In Chapter Five, "Whatever Happened to Zero?" Barrow explores some non-Euclidian geometries and shows how numbers are created out of the empty set in set theory, a neat ironic analogy to how universes are perhaps created out of the vacuum.

Beginning in Chapter Six, "Empty Universes," Barrow concentrates on cosmology. I have to warn you that, despite Professor Barrow's elegant and graceful style and an abundance of charts, sidebars, lively quotes, and illustrations, this is not an easy read. The subject at the level Barrow wants to discuss it, is quite frankly very difficult. I have followed cosmology as a hobby for many years, but I am not a physicist or a mathematician. Those who are will probably have an easier time of it. Nonetheless, I learned a lot from this book and if I had wanted to "study" the text, could have learned a lot more. One thing I did not learn, something I have yet to find in any book on cosmology, is an answer to the question, What is the source of the energy that drives the expansion of the universe? Or put another way, what caused the singularity to "explode"? (Any reader know the answer?)

Barrow shows that one of the things that recent cosmology has done to the Big Bang universe that was said to contain all of space and time (leaving no possibility for "nothing" or "anything" to exist "outside" of it since there was no outside) is to allow it to be part of a larger, possibly infinite universe. The idea that our universe may be but one of an infinite number of universes all popping probabilistically out of the vacuum is mind boggling beyond any ability to describe it. In reference to the possible eternal expansion of our particular universe, Barrow notes on page 300 that "When there is an infinite time to wait then anything that can happen, eventually will happen." Applying this deduction to that possible infinity of universes, one finds a companion to the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics in which a new universe is created with every quantum event, a companion that asserts that in an infinite universe every possible event will take place, and every thought unthought will eventually be thought, that indeed there are unicorns somewhere and politicians who don't lie, and a place where bread always lands butter side up.

Faced with this whimsy, I suspect that Barrow would quickly point out that that is why in physics when infinities come up in the equations, it is a sure sign that something is wrong. Nevertheless, the cosmos as revealed by modern astronomy, astrophysics, relativity, quantum mechanics, and the ideas from string theory, is a story of breathtaking and mind boggling sweep and grandeur, often totally unintuitive and beyond our wildest imaginings. As picturesque, inventive and psychologically satisfying as the tales of the ancients about the cosmos are (e.g., " It's turtles all the way down!") they pale beside the conception of the universe as seen by modern science. Professor Barrow is one of the very best at bringing this vision to lay readers, and The Book of Nothing is not to be missed.

I do have a couple of quibbles about the book. One chapter less on vacuum would have better served the flow of ideas. The philosophical development of zero/shunya didn't stop in Asia as soon as they exported it to Europe. Buddhists took the idea up (Nagarjuna especially) and today shunyata forms an integral part of Mahayana Buddhism. Barrow doesn't discuss this(for reasons of space?). On the whole, its almost as much fun as Seinfeld.