Book Review: The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas About the Origins of the Universe, Volume 49, Number 6

According to the Greek poet Hesiod (eighth century B.C.), the world was created ex vacuo, i.e., out of the void that existed before it, rather than ex nihilo, out of nothing. The distinction is fundamental and has led to centuries of commentaries and controversies in the fields of philosophy and religion as well as science. Indeed, a Book of Nothing was already published in 1510 in Amiens, France (with the Latin title Liber de Nichilo). Its author, the illuminist philosopher Charles de Bouelles, invoked the metaphysical and mystical doctrines of Nicolas of Cusa and the Neo-Platonists to show God in the act of creating a finite and temporal universe out of the void. The 2001 Book of Nothing is due to the prolific John Barrow, a research professor of mathematical sciences at the University of Cambridge, an internationally known cosmologist, and an enlightening science writer. He also directs the Millennium Mathematics Project, which aims to raise public understanding of mathematics (see http://mmp. maths.org/). Although Barrow does not refer to his rather unknown predecessor, his book draws on a rich cultural background in history, literature, philosophy, religion,...and, of course, science. Through 280 pages of text, twenty pages of quotes, 100 or so diagrams, followed by fifty pages of notes, Barrow takes the reader on a journey through history and science to explain every aspect of nothingness. From the zeros of mathematicians to the void of philosophers, from Shakespeare to the null set, from the ether to the quantum vacuum, his book tells how discoveries in science have revealed that Nothing has hidden depths. The book starts out with historical perceptions of nothing and zero, noting that the very concept was taboo in many places; the Greeks and the Romans did not have a zero in their number systems, and hence Europe for many centuries could not represent it. The zero of the current numeral system originated in India and was put into practice by the merchants of the flourishing medieval Arab civilization, whence it entered Europe in the late Middle Ages. From then, the mathematical zero triumphed because of its usefulness. The notion of a physical zero, however, did not enter the mindset until the physicists Torricelli and von Guericke, in the seventeenth century, removed all the air out of chambers, thereby producing the first laboratory demonstrations of vacuums.