Editor:
Barry Evans, in his column (“Plenty o’ Nuttin,” Oct. 10), finds a contradiction implied in the statement “There is nothing.” Alex Ricca, in response (Mailbox, Oct. 24), says “nothing” is an ideation, which requires a “something” to ideate it.
As Mr. Ricca points out, we have a concept of zero, expressed through a word: “zero.” The word “zero” is not zero. The word “zero” is a word, a label. But let’s start there, and use a “toy” situation to get a handle on what’s going on.
Computers can conceptually represent lots of things, but the representations all boil down to sequences of ones and zeros. A given spot in a computer’s memory might, at a given moment, represent the value 50, or 0, or pi. A spot in a computer can even represent the concept “nothing here, not zero or anything else.” That concept is known in many computer languages as “null.”
The computer representations consist of ones and zeros, but the things being represented (50, 0, pi, null) don’t depend on being represented in order to be possibilities in reality. Just unplug the computer, and you have (a computer version of) nothing.
It is perfectly reasonable for there to have been nothing. We just have a hard time fully conceptualizing it, as we exist and represent our concepts in the space-timey world of something.
Mitch Trachtenberg, Trinidad
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This article appears in ‘Doing its Part’.