I had this exact discussion in my physics class at school. The teacher had shown us a vacuum tube made of glass, explaining there was nothing in there. However, one other student and myself insisted there had to be something in the tube, as light was clearly passing through it, and light is not nothing.
What we refer to as "nothing" depends on context, obviously now we know that there isn't even such thing as absolute nothing in the physical world, there is always a field. So nobody really refers to absolute nothing when talking about something physical, it would make no sense.
"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it". - Mark Twain.
What i love so much about this channel is, albeit very limited, they involve critical and philosopical thinking in almost every video. It sparks our curiosity and thus, our interest.
“Our brain analyzes past experiences so we can adjust our future behavior” Oh god is this why my brain loves to flashback to past embarrassing or cringe-worthy moments in my life the moment I relax and find some peace
Basically, we naturally focus on the negative more because for most of our time on this earth, we pretty much needed to do so in order to find the flaws with our methods and means of survival and thus improve our chances of survival or ability to survive things.
I used to think about this question when I was like 8 years old, but it drove me crazy because if nothing is nothing the word nothing wouldn’t even exist so thanks for the clarification!
This reminds me of when my parents argued about nothing. One time when I was a kid, during a road trip in which my little sister and I became tired and cranky and bickered near nonstop, my parents tried to teach us a lesson about how silly our arguments were and how frustrating they were to listen to, by interrupting us to have a logical argument about literal nothing. My dad argued that nothing as the absence of something made nothing something, and my mom argued that something couldn’t be nothing because by its definition nothing is where there is not something. In a case with of cookies, by eating all your cookies, you had no or nothing cookies left, but if you ate all your cookies then you also did not have cookies. Unfortunately the lesson about petty arguments my parents were trying to teach soared over my and my sister’s head. We thought the whole performance to be hilarious and the concept of debating literal nothing even more hilarious and spent the rest of the drive engaging in our own increasingly silly and illogical argument about the meaning of nothing and giggling about it. However, the memory of that event stuck with me. When I saw the title of this video, I immediately thought of that road trip and my parents’ argument about nothing. I loved this video and shared it with my sister and my parents, and we enjoyed reminiscing about that long ago silly argument and learning more about nothing. Thank you for giving my family this enjoyable reminder. 😄
Wish my parents debated about stuff like this my father is never at home my mom is doing chores my sister is to small to understand anything I say actually anyone in my family doesn't understand what I say and Joe you me all of us are turning into a sauce served in v shape
I think a big take away is that we're still learning. There's things we don't know, and some things we think are fact that will one day be disproven. I also really liked how you showed how societal values can even impact our understanding of the universe. But to the point - we don't even know what SOMETHING is. The further down we go to find the base 'material' of the universe the more empty space we find. Even the smallest of subatomic particles can only be described (at this time) as basically waves.
maybe it's the things we don't know, or haven't remembered, or haven't perceived yet is nothingness. everything is something and nothing is something, but the something we don't know and haven't associated with everything truly is nothing and is in the aether awaiting our discovery of its existence - or, rather, somethingness.
@@fiyum333 The ancient philosopher Aristotle pointed out that things are not created, everything always existed all at once, but as possibilities. Yet, the biggest question that remains unanswered is why possibilities are possible, why they even exist? Why existence exists?
Joe's opening dialogue about whether or not he was doing nothing reminds me of that old Sesame Street skit where Ernie refuses to help Bert with the groceries because he argues that he's not doing nothing.
When working with variables in programming, there is a concept of a NULL value, or a nothing value. The idea is that zero (for numeric variables) and a string variable that contains no characters (literally nothing between the quotes "") is still SOMETHING. The idea of a NULL value is that you can create a variable and not assign it anything at that point. And you can wipe the value of the variable back to a NULL state. It's useful to see if something has interacted with the variable or if someone's filled out a field on a form. But now we named it, doesn't that make it SOMETHING?
NULL is empty, or none value, but it is something, and that something is a thing that represents actual nothingness. It is not nothing, but it represents nothing.
In Javascript we have initialized "empty" variables like 0, "", [], {} that have a type. Then you have initialized variables without a type, i.e. `null`. But there are also uninitialized variables that just don't exist at all, i.e. `undefined`. These are all very commonly used and have different behaviours.
Love this episode. Reminds me of the time in college I challenged my friends to think of nothing. We had a great laugh realising we couldn't and spawned some deep conversations
I have thought over this so many times and it's a weird thing. Because when you think of nothing there is always something, but for nothing to exist there has to be something.
Thirty spokes converge at the wheel's hub, to a hole that allows it to turn. Clay is shaped into a vessel, to enclose an emptiness that can be filled. Doors and windows are cut into walls, to provide access to their protection. Though we can only work with what is there, use comes from what is not there. -Lao Tsu
It's probably a translation thing, but I think the last stanza flows a bit better as one of the following: Though we can only work with what is there, use comes from that which is not. or Though we can only work with what there is, use comes from what there is not.
This is an important comment for a point made at the beginning of this video. The way math was done, this thing we often think of as infallible, was different according to different philosophies. Science and math are both philosophy. The way we look at things changes them. Take all of the candies away and you still have air and arms and lungs etc. but you’re left with nothing in regards to candy. Want a unified theory? It’s all in how you look at it.
Coincidentally, I spent about an hour 2 days ago pondering the meaning of absoluteness & nothingness, and I concluded that the only “Absolute is nothing.”
My favorite question to ask drunk people is, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Then, of course, I finally got drunk enough myself to have the thought that one's notion of something had to exist before one's notion of nothing because I saw nothing as an absence of something. Now I am also thinking that, even if nothing existed in and of itself, since our perception is based on something interacting with our senses, we would have no way to be able to perceive nothing in and of itself just by virtue of the limits of our ability to perceive.
At 8:57 Joe says that there are as few as 100 particles per cubic meter in intergalactic space. A cubic meter is 1,000,000 cubic centimeters. That would mean that there are 10,000 cubic centimeters of space that contain nothing. Of course, this ignores all of the quantumness that Joe talks about immediately after this.
The absence of matter still doesn't mean 'nothing'. Not only quantum fields, but also regular EM field, spacetime... Any volume is still something. True nothingness wouldn't occupy any space (I guess)
I don't understand why people hate the new inability to see how many dislikes there are. It was a toxic system that didn't bring any benefit. We don't lose anything by not being able to see that number. It literally has no use for you.
@@Matityahu-the-God are you delusional? The like/dislike ratio was the best tool to tell you if a video (like a tutorial for example) is even worth watching before you waste 10 minutes of your life for nothing. Removing it will only lead to infinitely many more scams and bad videos and by extension more unhappiness by youtube's users. And if we're being honest, the whole toxicity and hurting youtubers feelings is bullshit! They're only doing this to make big companies like late-night shows and news channels happy and besides if you can't handle a few dislikes maybe you shouldn't be a youtuber - not to mention that if anyone wanted to the option to turn them off was already there before and that even now creators are still able to see the dislikes on their own videos so it literally makes zero sense. This might be the worst thing that youtube has ever done and if you install that extension that still let's you see the dislikes, you will see that youtubes removing dislikes announcement video is actually quickly becoming one of most disliked videos ever posted to youtube (by ratio), so the community obviously hates it.
@@markinipannini the creators can still see the dislikes, so idk what the hell you're talking about. Nobody said anything about feelings of creators, you're the delusional one. Are you replying to the wrong comment or something?
@@Matityahu-the-God thats what I'm saying! UA-cams whole point for removing the dislikes is that youtubers get their poor little feelings hurt by dislikes, but regardless they are still able to see it! It doesn't make any sense! That's why everyone hates it!
Nothing is like infinite, it doesn't exist in reality, it's just a way of expressing mathematics. It's funny how can some people say that the universe came from nothing or from infinite universes.
some philosophers and scientists believe the universe is just mathematics. at the quantum level, distinct items and elements cease to exist, you just have equations. meanwhile, the majority of occurrences can be expressed as equations. mathematics doesn't describe a lot of physics ... it IS physics. the only place mathematics doesn't exist in such an immediate level is human perception.
This reminds me of a philosophy teacher I know who used to ask his students to write an essay about nought... good thing he was a good guy as he always gave some points for the effort.
That would be so hard. I don't think you can describe nothing. If nothing can be described, that means its description is something. And if the description of something is something, then the thing its describing is also something and therefore not nothing.
Dunno about y'all but sometimes I just drift away and think about stuff like this. Sometimes I look around me and get amazed by how far humanity has come and how we started out as simple animals like the others around us.
This video made me feel really weird in a good way, I have been dealing with a serious fear, almost a phobia, of death, just thinking about the world eons after I die sometimes pushes me to the edge of crying but thinking about becoming something else (and I mean only physically, I am not religious), getting the elements that ARE my body back to nature and universe to become a lot of somethings elses is really comforting, thank you for those last phrases :)
Life is very fascinating and sad, we as individuals being so aware and conscious of the fact of being alive and unique as individuals, so many personalities and great people we are, but don't fear death, see death as the ultimate mystery that we all someday will get an answer to when we get old, and don't forget that we have all already been dead before we were born, being dead is where we truly belong, but most importantly, don't live your life thinking about death, being alive is about living, because no matter how much you think about death you will eventually realize that it's just a waste of time and how ridiculous it is to think about it when you are living, we are not dead until we are dead, and when we are dead that's when we can start to think about it. Also, everything we are made of comes from Earth, and we will leave what we are made of on Earth. But just live now and enjoy life, try to be happy, it's the best feeling in the world, it makes you appreciate what life is, with happiness you counter death so easily, and you will appreciate every living being around you, how fantastic it for us all to share this time together, and who knows, maybe there is something afterwards which might be even better, but until then, we will try to live in heaven already! The particles that makes up us will always be around anyway, don't worry about it, we will always be here together. Live as you will live forever, the only thing that makes sense.
@@scottslotterbeck3796 Which atoms are you referring to? The atoms that made up your body when you were a baby? The atoms of 10 year old you? If you live another decade or so, none of the atoms that are you now will be in future Scott, they may even be incorporated into someone else or be floating around in the ocean. It makes no sense to consider yourself atoms or molecules which are completely generic and interchangeable.
@@scottslotterbeck3796 I believe what Steve is referring to is the physiological equivalent of the 'Ship of Theseus', a thought experiment that has flummoxed philosophers for millennia. It's Okay to be Smart explored this topic in their recent video: ua-cam.com/video/6EowCxpKKJ0/v-deo.html
You said the most important thing in here at one point: "nothing can't exist". After years of thinking about the question of why there is something rather than nothing, I find that to be a surprisingly satisfying answer. "Nothing can't exist". It seems overly simplistic but any way you come at it you can't really get around that statement
Me: What did you learn? You: Nothing And make sure you take the PBS Digital Studios annual viewer survey and tell them how much you love our show! to.pbs.org/2021survey
Grateful for PBS and UA-cam!! Super thankful (for) "It's Okay To Be Smart"!!! And a big thanks to everyone who makes quality science/educational shows/programming possible!!!!!!!
I actually used to start every school lesson with "ours is a decimal and positional system of calculation" back when I was in 1st grade. Same happened in middle school with: "numbers are a rapresentation of a quantity, not a quantity itself"
Thanks for this video. It brought back treasured memories of my dad egging on a teenage me with the argument, “…but nothing is something.” It was four decades ago but it might as well have been yesterday. You were right, dad. I sure miss you.
my favorite funfact about "nothing" ? The Boltzmann brain concept. ->due to how quantum mechanics seems to function; it is perfectly possible for say a clump of gold to randomly appear out of nowhere in the middle of empty space. it's VERY VERY VERY unlikely. but possible. any combo, any material, any structure. the larger & more comples, the LESS likely. but never zero. ->in an infinite universe with infinite time this would imply that at some point in time, at some place for no real reason a fully formed entity/brain/person will just randomly appear (and start living). >You name it. If it can exist in reality, it CAN appear out of thin air in empty space for no good reason. The chances of it happening may be 1 over 'near infinity' but hey, the universe is infinite and time likely is too. and "near infinity" is less then actual infinity THEREFORE logically speaking at some point your mom will pop up in random space, with all of her memories and thicc booty and wonder why you still haven't cleaned your bedroom today. Boltzmann brain. look it up!
Technically time isn't infinite, especially if theories of the eventual heat death of the universe, paired with particle decay that will empty the universe of anything measurable within, are true. At that point time, as we define it, stops and therefore has an end.
@@rjthescholar177 true, but with absolutely nothing happening in this heat-death universe, time won't matter anyway, even IF it continues. Because there will be almost nothing there to experience it anyway
@@rjthescholar177 space time might continue to expand after the heat death. Time is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not a well defined quantity. It is fair to suggest time requires action, rather than the other way around, but this is conjecture, interpretation, not empirical falsifiability.
I’ve zoned out enough to think about nothing. Took in visual stimuli but my brain was not processing any of it. Snapped back to reality when my dad asked me what I was thinking about and couldn’t remember the last min or 2
I guess its once again time to bring back one of my favorites quotes. "For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either." BLAISE PASCAL, FRENCH PHILOSOPHER, "PASCAL'S WAGER" Saw this in the Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War loading screens many years ago.
I made a character a long time ago which is a manifestation of nothing, but is also representative of in-betweens. It was/is before the big bang and after the end. When there is a grim reaper presenting the hand of death, this entity takes them to their own death, because after the last living entity dies, death as a process and a concept is no more. Void is the physical, philosophical, personal, conceptual space between two people. It is the nebulous space between your screen and mine. It hovers between real, fictional, and conceptual multiverses. As nothing is a concept outside of spacetime, it is often revisiting/at the big bang, but is also omnipresent within ideas and values, connecting the "something" that it longs to be, but is not, and never will be.
"According to most models of physics, there can't be anything outside the universe, because the universe is, by definition, everything." Can someone please explain to me how this is different from the universe expanding into nothing? How is 'not being anything' different from being nothing, and what is the purpose of this distinction?
Something expanding into nothing is like a puddle of water spreading out to dry surface. Not being anything is more like the surface has always been wet and the somethings are the droplets sticking out of the wet surface.
That's the point, nothingness doesn't exist outside of the theoretical, but we made it up imagining the antithesis of everything which is something we can attest to. Just like negative values and perfection aren't real in a strict sense, but you can imagine the concept and work around it.
Example to help visualise it: When we measure curvature of universe geometry it looks like its flat (no curvature, parallel lines stay parallel, angles work like you expect them to) and apparently it suggests that universe is infinite. In this scenario infinite universe expands and is well... still infinite, just distances between points in space grew larger. There can be no nothingness beyond edge of universe if no matter how far you go either direction you will never find such boundary. OFC there is possibility that universe is curved and just sooooo much larger than our observable bubble that we cannot measure curvature, but here I'm at loss about how nothingness would apply and if there could be something beyond universe if size is finite.
"Nothing" and "Something" are just words like everything else. We shape reality around the way we think, not the other way around. Reality as it exists and reality as it exists within our own minds are two separate things. Reality itself has no concept of something or nothingness, it's just the way our brains decode reality in a way that seems to make sense to us.
Arguably noumena can be understood as divergences and convergences of the interrelations in nature which cause our phenomenological sense of similarity and difference. Which is to say I agree, yet the two are not logically distinct, beyond a Kantian categorical sense.
Then what is the existence of brain. In brain there is movement of electric charge which creates the thought and thinking. Then at first place why does brain exist or does it exists?
@@deepakkumarsingh2900 the brain exists because it was an evolutionary advantage for our ancestors to have increasingly complex nervous systems that eventually resulted in brains. Brains let animals predict future behavior based on passed events with some degree of accuracy and the more sophisticated ones can learn and adapt.
That's both accurate and useless. The world is far too complex for us to deal with each thing in it so our brains mostly work in abstractions, which are categories, assign words to represent them and reason about those. If you dismiss something because it just words and categories you are dismissing basically all human though and reason. Its not a meaningful criticism or helpful observation unless we are actually talking about how people think.
I had this argument with my ex best friend in college. It was the catalyst to our friendship ending. She refused to accept that the idea of “nothing” is completely subjective. She insisted “nothing” was always “something”. I was thinking more philosophical, she was thinking more rational. I accepted that and she wouldn’t. Lol it was the most infuriating conversation tbh.
My Wife: "Watchya watchin'?" Me: "Nothing..." My Wife: "Fine, be that way." Me: "No, but.... Look it's about.." My Wife: * stomps off and slams the door *
This reminds me of one dream, a black hole was shooting through the sky and with each time it was closer and closer until it swallowed everything(me including) and I felt... noting? death? I have no way to put it in words, I was just feeling without being able to create any conscious thought
Which off course is too much something to be nothing but strange enough. Your dream ran into trouble trying to represent real nothing, but you were still there. Imagine 10^500 failed universes in the multiverse all without observers. How could they ever be said to be real? Imagine not even one universe, no observers, just nothing. I can't imagine that either.
The closest thing to 'nothing', is the classification of concepts that can't exist physically. Absolute Zero, a perfect vacuum, energy removed/destroyed from the universe, etc. Also since concepts can be created, but not destroyed (since the information now exists, but it can be lost/forgotten), time generally goes forward.
There was a story I once read involving a group of people getting trapped in a hypercube shaped like a house. One person looks out a window and see's nothing. The story takes a moment to explain that what they see isn't blackness or a pure white space, but nothing at all. It's a mind breaking exercise... like imagine transparency with nothing beyond it, forever...
Hah! I thought of this idea myself years ago. :) Another way of conceptualizing it that I came up with was to imagine the whole universe without color - and in this case white and black are also colors. Both approaches paint the same picture, except you can't actually imagine that picture!
It has various meanings, and it depends on the context it is being use. However, it cannot escape that the moment you define it, "something" encompasses it. It is still an information, a kind of configuration, a phenomenon.
I've been thinking about this a lot. Differences is very important. Temperature, density, such as the ocean, then air, then space.. differences are necessary for every action in nature to occur.
Entropy is crazy too. If you have a bunch of "same", it doesn't do anything. But if you have a bunch of "difference", things happen until it is all "same". That's probably the easiest way I can explain how literally everything in existence works.
"Well, it's when people call out at you just as you're going off to do it, 'What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?' and you say, 'Oh, Nothing,' and then you go and do it. It means just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering." "Oh!" said Pooh
@@rohdx I would say invented coz he did not find out something which was originally there. Like for india , vasco da gama discovered india - the country was originally there . But zero as a digit was not
Aristotle thought that if an object moved through nothing, it would move infinitely fast. That's kind of true if you consider the Higgs field the final "something". So good job, Aristotle!
Nothing can’t exist because “nothing” implies no-thing. You can’t have something without nothing, and you can’t have nothing without something. One implies the other and are forever married to one another.
If it started from nothing, then there must be already something in existence before everything who has no beginning and end. The source of everything.
0:36 woa woa hold on zero isn't nothing, it's Identity element in summation on some major sets and can be called "nothing" in that sense but, have you multipled by nothing? you get nothing! that's prettty big imo
My creative writing professor challenged us to write an easy about nothing. Way way back then it was English 212. Yea, not possible and I was one of only a few who realized this. So she told me to defend. I say, once you put the first letter it becomes something. She didn’t give grades so I got what she called a credit. Nothingness is impossible. Even in a void with absence of all atoms and virtual particles is still something because humans can perceive darkness.
Great video! Gotta be a pedant for a sec 🙂 Unless I’m mistaken, pi was originally thought of, not as circumference to diameter, but as the ratio of the AREA of a circle to the area of a SQUARE with a side length equal to the radius. Hence the area formula. I remember this when I brought up tau to my history of math professor. Though, of course, pi was not the standard/conventional symbol until much later.
Software developers have a quite good definition of "nothing". We differentiate between 0, which is a legit number and null. I think most people have seen the error message "NullReferenceException". This always happens when something specific is supposed to be accessed but the requested object does not exist (returns null) and the developer forgot to implement a proper handling for such an error. Another example is when you have a list of specific objects, let's say fruits. You let the computer search "how many oranges are there in this list?". If it returns 0 it simply means there are no oranges but if it returns null it means something went wrong and the whole list does not even exist.
Reminded me of a poem I wrote which was basically me wondering if nothing and something were equal or not. Thanks to past humans messing with us, now, nothing exists.
Has this show gotten more oriented toward kids over time? The simplistic explanations about dark matter and about what happens around absolute 0, compared to say, what one might hear on Vsauce, Kurzgesagt or even SciShow, made me realize this content seems particularly suited for younger learners.
@@Pottery4Life The thing is that vsauce focused on having their own spin on obscure topics and/or obscure presentations of common topics, all with a splash of weird humour. This channels is more like, Dora the Explorer for teenagers, just stating a chain of easily accessible info in a further simplified, slightly opinionated format.
Plus, Vsauce, Kurzgesagt and Veritasium are still among the more accessible channels, suitable for intelligent and curious tweens. I didn't even mention the likes of PBS Space Time, 3Blue1Brown or Numberphile... Anyway, my goal was not to disparage the content of this channel. After a while without watching their videos, I was just checking whether I should still consider myself part of their target audience.
@@JCUDOS I agree with the fact that it seems more kid-oriented now than before. Compare, for example the episode of how the Covid vaccine was developed. While he glossed over complicated things there as well, I didn’t feel like he was a second grade teacher giving a math lesson. I taught 2nd grade a number of years ago, and this is a video I would feel very comfortable showing in my class.
9:26 is this what quantum physicist say like " everything is made out of wave, it just become a particle when we observe them, or the wave function collapse to a single point when observed "?? Physics are hellof confusing 😅
Observation by a conscious being is not what's required or necessary. Even in a complete vaccuum numerous quantum fields exist. A perturbation of a field can create a 'wavicle' given all perturbations of any of these numerous fields are both particle and wave at the same time (no equivalent thing exists in our classical realm but thousands of tests prove this is a definitive thing in the quantum realm). Any interaction of one wavicle with another one will result in a wave collapse...no observation necessary. In turn, this is how energy coalesces into physical matter which latter provides the building blocks for complexity.
I can think in nothing. I do it when I want to sleep. I just concentrate on what I'm hearing (cars going by in the distance, mostly) while shutting down my internal monologe (which is hard to do when I'm anxious for example). But I can shut down my brain if it's necessary.
Aryabhatta 5th century, earlier use of Shunya 3rd or 4th century in some sanskrit manuscript. Do maybe it was a Hindu scientist before Aryabhatta. All this is in the video.
@@somratkhan8688 exactly! Negative numbers mean the absence of something that should be there, in a simple sense. Its basically just attaching a value to the amount of nothing you have and how to get to the point of something
Like Aristotle said,"Nothing is what rocks dream about". If your trying to define nothing more than that, then its something. If i say i eat nothing for lunch, i literally eat nothing for lunch. I do not eat something called nothing for lunch.
I had this exact discussion in my physics class at school. The teacher had shown us a vacuum tube made of glass, explaining there was nothing in there. However, one other student and myself insisted there had to be something in the tube, as light was clearly passing through it, and light is not nothing.
Exactly what I was thinking
if i said that the teacher would probably say thats not the point or something
What we refer to as "nothing" depends on context, obviously now we know that there isn't even such thing as absolute nothing in the physical world, there is always a field. So nobody really refers to absolute nothing when talking about something physical, it would make no sense.
You sure showed that teacher who's boss
@@jimc.goodfellas real cringe
"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it". - Mark Twain.
"I can bear darkness unless i have seen light" - Some Interlectual
sorry for my bad English
Yeah?! Well… _now_ what does he think?
Blah blah
Amogus
Greatest quote in all of human history
So if I say I learned nothing today, that doesn't mean a lack of learning. Today I learned a lot about nothing. Very educational.
Or nothing :|
In the parallel nothing universe: “What is something?”
its.. something
Everything?
Nothing
Queue Vsauce theme
It is imaginary yet
Joe is evolving into his Vsauce form
True😂
Or is he?
Wsauce
Apprentice Michael
Was about to say the same thing😂😂
What i love so much about this channel is, albeit very limited, they involve critical and philosopical thinking in almost every video. It sparks our curiosity and thus, our interest.
Me too. Been watching almost every video for years. Quality content draws back in every time. 👍
On point dear 😍❤❤ indeed the best!
Well said.
“Our brain analyzes past experiences so we can adjust our future behavior” Oh god is this why my brain loves to flashback to past embarrassing or cringe-worthy moments in my life the moment I relax and find some peace
Basically, we naturally focus on the negative more because for most of our time on this earth, we pretty much needed to do so in order to find the flaws with our methods and means of survival and thus improve our chances of survival or ability to survive things.
@@johnwalker1058 perhaps we'll evolve our way out of our brains being relentless with it.
nothing is more cringe
if i stop doing nothing then nothing will make me think of that
We’re biological robots
As Freddie Mercury once said: "Nothing" really matters to me.
is that pfp Mylo Xyloto?
I see a little silhouetto of nothingness.
Legendddddd
He also said a dragonfly trumpeter is his hero...
Hey Jose
Watya gonna do widat comic material, MSG and Wembley stadium have reportedly have scabby inchy ring peices
I was watching this video and someone asked me what I was watching. I replied "nothing" 😊Thank you, I always enjoy your videos
I used to think about this question when I was like 8 years old, but it drove me crazy because if nothing is nothing the word nothing wouldn’t even exist so thanks for the clarification!
Joe:- "Who invented 0 and when, we don't know for sure"
Aryabhatta :- Am I a joke to you?
😂
I was about to comment the same
The Indian mathematician/astronomer Brahmagpta.
Was about to say the same thing
I love and hate your pfp
This reminds me of when my parents argued about nothing. One time when I was a kid, during a road trip in which my little sister and I became tired and cranky and bickered near nonstop, my parents tried to teach us a lesson about how silly our arguments were and how frustrating they were to listen to, by interrupting us to have a logical argument about literal nothing. My dad argued that nothing as the absence of something made nothing something, and my mom argued that something couldn’t be nothing because by its definition nothing is where there is not something. In a case with of cookies, by eating all your cookies, you had no or nothing cookies left, but if you ate all your cookies then you also did not have cookies. Unfortunately the lesson about petty arguments my parents were trying to teach soared over my and my sister’s head. We thought the whole performance to be hilarious and the concept of debating literal nothing even more hilarious and spent the rest of the drive engaging in our own increasingly silly and illogical argument about the meaning of nothing and giggling about it. However, the memory of that event stuck with me. When I saw the title of this video, I immediately thought of that road trip and my parents’ argument about nothing. I loved this video and shared it with my sister and my parents, and we enjoyed reminiscing about that long ago silly argument and learning more about nothing. Thank you for giving my family this enjoyable reminder. 😄
That sounds like some A+ parenting though
Hello
Wish my parents debated about stuff like this my father is never at home my mom is doing chores my sister is to small to understand anything I say actually anyone in my family doesn't understand what I say and Joe you me all of us are turning into a sauce served in v shape
i got nothing out of that 😂🎉
I can't believe I'm going to watch an almost 16-minute video about nothing. Here goes nothing!
Lol, that could be such a brain teaser of a sentence xD
Seinfeld made an entire show about nothing. It was quite succesfull :P
Lol. Same here
@@zjweele13
successful*
@@Richard_Nickerson pedantic*
I think a big take away is that we're still learning. There's things we don't know, and some things we think are fact that will one day be disproven. I also really liked how you showed how societal values can even impact our understanding of the universe. But to the point - we don't even know what SOMETHING is. The further down we go to find the base 'material' of the universe the more empty space we find. Even the smallest of subatomic particles can only be described (at this time) as basically waves.
maybe it's the things we don't know, or haven't remembered, or haven't perceived yet is nothingness. everything is something and nothing is something, but the something we don't know and haven't associated with everything truly is nothing and is in the aether awaiting our discovery of its existence - or, rather, somethingness.
@@fiyum333 Ecclesiastes 1: ...There is nothing new under the sun, it has already been of old...!
@@fiyum333
The ancient philosopher Aristotle pointed out that things are not created, everything always existed all at once, but as possibilities.
Yet, the biggest question that remains unanswered is why possibilities are possible, why they even exist? Why existence exists?
The whole time I could only think of, "There's literally EVERYTHING in space, Morty!"
Watch a different show
ua-cam.com/video/TYR3uCgp6nI/v-deo.html
@@dallaselgin2636 No, I don't think I will.
Joe's opening dialogue about whether or not he was doing nothing reminds me of that old Sesame Street skit where Ernie refuses to help Bert with the groceries because he argues that he's not doing nothing.
I thought of that too!!!
I think of Seinfeld
When working with variables in programming, there is a concept of a NULL value, or a nothing value. The idea is that zero (for numeric variables) and a string variable that contains no characters (literally nothing between the quotes "") is still SOMETHING. The idea of a NULL value is that you can create a variable and not assign it anything at that point. And you can wipe the value of the variable back to a NULL state. It's useful to see if something has interacted with the variable or if someone's filled out a field on a form.
But now we named it, doesn't that make it SOMETHING?
It's also the cause of notorious nullpointer exceptions
@@osiris1102 For that, I blame the programmer. ;)
NULL is empty, or none value, but it is something, and that something is a thing that represents actual nothingness. It is not nothing, but it represents nothing.
yes, in that sense it is something. it’s a value. how much value? 0. It’s still a category, which is something.
In Javascript we have initialized "empty" variables like 0, "", [], {} that have a type. Then you have initialized variables without a type, i.e. `null`. But there are also uninitialized variables that just don't exist at all, i.e. `undefined`. These are all very commonly used and have different behaviours.
If Nothing is the Opposite of Everything , then Everything is related from Nothing? Wow , that's Deep! Thanks for the illumination!
Yup, I've learned "nothing" from watching this video today. Great job, Joe! Keep it up! Keep teaching us nothing, lol!
@King Pistachion lmao me too
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Love this episode. Reminds me of the time in college I challenged my friends to think of nothing. We had a great laugh realising we couldn't and spawned some deep conversations
I have thought over this so many times and it's a weird thing. Because when you think of nothing there is always something, but for nothing to exist there has to be something.
0:52 As a mathematician I need to say that the opposite of nothing is "at least one" and the opposite of all is "at least one is not"
Thirty spokes converge at the wheel's hub,
to a hole that allows it to turn.
Clay is shaped into a vessel,
to enclose an emptiness that can be filled.
Doors and windows are cut into walls,
to provide access to their protection.
Though we can only work with what is there,
use comes from what is not there.
-Lao Tsu
It's probably a translation thing, but I think the last stanza flows a bit better as one of the following:
Though we can only work with what is there,
use comes from that which is not.
or
Though we can only work with what there is,
use comes from what there is not.
This is an important comment for a point made at the beginning of this video. The way math was done, this thing we often think of as infallible, was different according to different philosophies. Science and math are both philosophy. The way we look at things changes them. Take all of the candies away and you still have air and arms and lungs etc. but you’re left with nothing in regards to candy. Want a unified theory? It’s all in how you look at it.
Coincidentally, I spent about an hour 2 days ago pondering the meaning of absoluteness & nothingness, and I concluded that the only “Absolute is nothing.”
just realising, I miss vsauce videos, but then again, this channel delivers what vsauce used to.
Vsauce is still putting out good content
@@paule.2687 just not often
@@paule.2687 Maybe 2 or 3 videos a year.... (shorts don't count)
My favorite question to ask drunk people is, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Then, of course, I finally got drunk enough myself to have the thought that one's notion of something had to exist before one's notion of nothing because I saw nothing as an absence of something. Now I am also thinking that, even if nothing existed in and of itself, since our perception is based on something interacting with our senses, we would have no way to be able to perceive nothing in and of itself just by virtue of the limits of our ability to perceive.
You'll love this ua-cam.com/video/4TAO_NjrJ7M/v-deo.html
So this guy spend 15 minutes explaining the meaning of "nothing"... Woah the dedication is just mind-blowing bro 😭🤌
At 8:57 Joe says that there are as few as 100 particles per cubic meter in intergalactic space. A cubic meter is 1,000,000 cubic centimeters. That would mean that there are 10,000 cubic centimeters of space that contain nothing. Of course, this ignores all of the quantumness that Joe talks about immediately after this.
The absence of matter still doesn't mean 'nothing'. Not only quantum fields, but also regular EM field, spacetime... Any volume is still something. True nothingness wouldn't occupy any space (I guess)
Actually, the average density of the universe is one proton per cubic metre.
But maybe he also counted in the fotons.
Nothing doesn’t exist. As something does, and always will have had.
@@ximecreature true nothingless will occupy infinite space, not any space
@@ximecreature can it even have volume if its nothing?
"What is nothing?"
**Cuts open head of whoever decided to remove UA-cam dislikes**
"Nvm, found it"
SERIOUSLY!!!
I don't understand why people hate the new inability to see how many dislikes there are. It was a toxic system that didn't bring any benefit. We don't lose anything by not being able to see that number. It literally has no use for you.
@@Matityahu-the-God are you delusional? The like/dislike ratio was the best tool to tell you if a video (like a tutorial for example) is even worth watching before you waste 10 minutes of your life for nothing. Removing it will only lead to infinitely many more scams and bad videos and by extension more unhappiness by youtube's users. And if we're being honest, the whole toxicity and hurting youtubers feelings is bullshit! They're only doing this to make big companies like late-night shows and news channels happy and besides if you can't handle a few dislikes maybe you shouldn't be a youtuber - not to mention that if anyone wanted to the option to turn them off was already there before and that even now creators are still able to see the dislikes on their own videos so it literally makes zero sense.
This might be the worst thing that youtube has ever done and if you install that extension that still let's you see the dislikes, you will see that youtubes removing dislikes announcement video is actually quickly becoming one of most disliked videos ever posted to youtube (by ratio), so the community obviously hates it.
@@markinipannini the creators can still see the dislikes, so idk what the hell you're talking about. Nobody said anything about feelings of creators, you're the delusional one. Are you replying to the wrong comment or something?
@@Matityahu-the-God thats what I'm saying! UA-cams whole point for removing the dislikes is that youtubers get their poor little feelings hurt by dislikes, but regardless they are still able to see it! It doesn't make any sense! That's why everyone hates it!
Nothing is like infinite, it doesn't exist in reality, it's just a way of expressing mathematics. It's funny how can some people say that the universe came from nothing or from infinite universes.
InFinity, may in fact, be the only, real thing.
Nothing = No Thing
@@anunknownperson4018 depend on the defination of 'thing'
some philosophers and scientists believe the universe is just mathematics. at the quantum level, distinct items and elements cease to exist, you just have equations. meanwhile, the majority of occurrences can be expressed as equations. mathematics doesn't describe a lot of physics ... it IS physics.
the only place mathematics doesn't exist in such an immediate level is human perception.
I am a big time daydreamer, and I feel like I understand myself and the way my mind works a lot better now. Thank you for that.
This reminds me of a philosophy teacher I know who used to ask his students to write an essay about nought... good thing he was a good guy as he always gave some points for the effort.
What grade would I have received for never handing anything in and disclaiming any knowledge of the assignment's existence?
That would be so hard. I don't think you can describe nothing. If nothing can be described, that means its description is something. And if the description of something is something, then the thing its describing is also something and therefore not nothing.
*hands in a blank piece of paper*
Dunno about y'all but sometimes I just drift away and think about stuff like this. Sometimes I look around me and get amazed by how far humanity has come and how we started out as simple animals like the others around us.
This video made me feel really weird in a good way, I have been dealing with a serious fear, almost a phobia, of death, just thinking about the world eons after I die sometimes pushes me to the edge of crying but thinking about becoming something else (and I mean only physically, I am not religious), getting the elements that ARE my body back to nature and universe to become a lot of somethings elses is really comforting, thank you for those last phrases :)
Life is very fascinating and sad, we as individuals being so aware and conscious of the fact of being alive and unique as individuals, so many personalities and great people we are, but don't fear death, see death as the ultimate mystery that we all someday will get an answer to when we get old, and don't forget that we have all already been dead before we were born, being dead is where we truly belong, but most importantly, don't live your life thinking about death, being alive is about living, because no matter how much you think about death you will eventually realize that it's just a waste of time and how ridiculous it is to think about it when you are living, we are not dead until we are dead, and when we are dead that's when we can start to think about it. Also, everything we are made of comes from Earth, and we will leave what we are made of on Earth. But just live now and enjoy life, try to be happy, it's the best feeling in the world, it makes you appreciate what life is, with happiness you counter death so easily, and you will appreciate every living being around you, how fantastic it for us all to share this time together, and who knows, maybe there is something afterwards which might be even better, but until then, we will try to live in heaven already! The particles that makes up us will always be around anyway, don't worry about it, we will always be here together. Live as you will live forever, the only thing that makes sense.
Don't worry. No one knows. Your atoms will persist.
@@scottslotterbeck3796 Which atoms are you referring to? The atoms that made up your body when you were a baby? The atoms of 10 year old you? If you live another decade or so, none of the atoms that are you now will be in future Scott, they may even be incorporated into someone else or be floating around in the ocean. It makes no sense to consider yourself atoms or molecules which are completely generic and interchangeable.
@@caricue Atoms live. Part of you will always be here.
@@scottslotterbeck3796 I believe what Steve is referring to is the physiological equivalent of the 'Ship of Theseus', a thought experiment that has flummoxed philosophers for millennia. It's Okay to be Smart explored this topic in their recent video: ua-cam.com/video/6EowCxpKKJ0/v-deo.html
This word always leads to discussion in "Philosophy" way.
You said the most important thing in here at one point: "nothing can't exist".
After years of thinking about the question of why there is something rather than nothing, I find that to be a surprisingly satisfying answer. "Nothing can't exist". It seems overly simplistic but any way you come at it you can't really get around that statement
Me: What did you learn?
You: Nothing
And make sure you take the PBS Digital Studios annual viewer survey and tell them how much you love our show! to.pbs.org/2021survey
Me in school
" "
I didn't say that
me rn
Ahahha
Grateful for PBS and UA-cam!!
Super thankful (for) "It's Okay To Be Smart"!!!
And a big thanks to everyone who makes quality science/educational shows/programming possible!!!!!!!
I actually used to start every school lesson with "ours is a decimal and positional system of calculation" back when I was in 1st grade. Same happened in middle school with: "numbers are a rapresentation of a quantity, not a quantity itself"
Joe: what are you thinking about?
Me with anphantasia: Everything and nothing
what were your made up stories looking like
same also it’s aphantasia
Today I learned that Joe is a man who swallows tacos whole.
Without even chew it
And shares all his candies
@@fajaradi1223 that's exactly what Penny said
You mean that's not normal?
Just like a man with culture.
“No matter how hard you try you can’t think about nothing” oh you’d be surprised how much nothing there is in my brain
Somebody: "What are you good at?"
Me: "Nothing.".
Somebody: "Wow, you're a genius!"
Atomists: "Nothing is real."
Existentialists and nihilists: "Same."
Bastion and Atreyu: "Yeah, it's definitely real."
And it got bigger. AND BIGGER.....
-rock biter
this is one of the best science videos I've ever seen. thoughtful and insightful. no unnecessary comedy or hyperactive editing. subscribed!
Thanks for this video. It brought back treasured memories of my dad egging on a teenage me with the argument, “…but nothing is something.” It was four decades ago but it might as well have been yesterday. You were right, dad. I sure miss you.
my favorite funfact about "nothing" ? The Boltzmann brain concept.
->due to how quantum mechanics seems to function; it is perfectly possible for say a clump of gold to randomly appear out of nowhere in the middle of empty space. it's VERY VERY VERY unlikely. but possible. any combo, any material, any structure. the larger & more comples, the LESS likely. but never zero.
->in an infinite universe with infinite time this would imply that at some point in time, at some place for no real reason a fully formed entity/brain/person will just randomly appear (and start living).
>You name it.
If it can exist in reality, it CAN appear out of thin air in empty space for no good reason.
The chances of it happening may be 1 over 'near infinity'
but hey, the universe is infinite and time likely is too.
and "near infinity" is less then actual infinity
THEREFORE logically speaking
at some point your mom will pop up in random space, with all of her memories and thicc booty
and wonder why you still haven't cleaned your bedroom today.
Boltzmann brain.
look it up!
Technically time isn't infinite, especially if theories of the eventual heat death of the universe, paired with particle decay that will empty the universe of anything measurable within, are true. At that point time, as we define it, stops and therefore has an end.
@@CthulhuTheory Time could be infinite, heat death is the end of thermodynamic processes, not the end of time.
@@rjthescholar177 true, but with absolutely nothing happening in this heat-death universe, time won't matter anyway, even IF it continues. Because there will be almost nothing there to experience it anyway
@@rjthescholar177 space time might continue to expand after the heat death. Time is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not a well defined quantity. It is fair to suggest time requires action, rather than the other way around, but this is conjecture, interpretation, not empirical falsifiability.
I’ve zoned out enough to think about nothing. Took in visual stimuli but my brain was not processing any of it. Snapped back to reality when my dad asked me what I was thinking about and couldn’t remember the last min or 2
I guess its once again time to bring back one of my favorites quotes.
"For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either."
BLAISE PASCAL, FRENCH PHILOSOPHER, "PASCAL'S WAGER"
Saw this in the Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War loading screens many years ago.
"The empty set is a subset of all sets". Nothing is everywhere!
I made a character a long time ago which is a manifestation of nothing, but is also representative of in-betweens. It was/is before the big bang and after the end. When there is a grim reaper presenting the hand of death, this entity takes them to their own death, because after the last living entity dies, death as a process and a concept is no more. Void is the physical, philosophical, personal, conceptual space between two people. It is the nebulous space between your screen and mine. It hovers between real, fictional, and conceptual multiverses. As nothing is a concept outside of spacetime, it is often revisiting/at the big bang, but is also omnipresent within ideas and values, connecting the "something" that it longs to be, but is not, and never will be.
"According to most models of physics, there can't be anything outside the universe, because the universe is, by definition, everything." Can someone please explain to me how this is different from the universe expanding into nothing? How is 'not being anything' different from being nothing, and what is the purpose of this distinction?
The universe expands on it self.
Something expanding into nothing is like a puddle of water spreading out to dry surface. Not being anything is more like the surface has always been wet and the somethings are the droplets sticking out of the wet surface.
Who made this definition? God? Man?
That's the point, nothingness doesn't exist outside of the theoretical, but we made it up imagining the antithesis of everything which is something we can attest to.
Just like negative values and perfection aren't real in a strict sense, but you can imagine the concept and work around it.
Example to help visualise it: When we measure curvature of universe geometry it looks like its flat (no curvature, parallel lines stay parallel, angles work like you expect them to) and apparently it suggests that universe is infinite. In this scenario infinite universe expands and is well... still infinite, just distances between points in space grew larger. There can be no nothingness beyond edge of universe if no matter how far you go either direction you will never find such boundary. OFC there is possibility that universe is curved and just sooooo much larger than our observable bubble that we cannot measure curvature, but here I'm at loss about how nothingness would apply and if there could be something beyond universe if size is finite.
"Nothing" and "Something" are just words like everything else. We shape reality around the way we think, not the other way around. Reality as it exists and reality as it exists within our own minds are two separate things. Reality itself has no concept of something or nothingness, it's just the way our brains decode reality in a way that seems to make sense to us.
Arguably noumena can be understood as divergences and convergences of the interrelations in nature which cause our phenomenological sense of similarity and difference. Which is to say I agree, yet the two are not logically distinct, beyond a Kantian categorical sense.
Then what is the existence of brain. In brain there is movement of electric charge which creates the thought and thinking. Then at first place why does brain exist or does it exists?
@@deepakkumarsingh2900 the brain exists because it was an evolutionary advantage for our ancestors to have increasingly complex nervous systems that eventually resulted in brains. Brains let animals predict future behavior based on passed events with some degree of accuracy and the more sophisticated ones can learn and adapt.
That's both accurate and useless. The world is far too complex for us to deal with each thing in it so our brains mostly work in abstractions, which are categories, assign words to represent them and reason about those. If you dismiss something because it just words and categories you are dismissing basically all human though and reason. Its not a meaningful criticism or helpful observation unless we are actually talking about how people think.
I had this argument with my ex best friend in college. It was the catalyst to our friendship ending. She refused to accept that the idea of “nothing” is completely subjective. She insisted “nothing” was always “something”. I was thinking more philosophical, she was thinking more rational. I accepted that and she wouldn’t. Lol it was the most infuriating conversation tbh.
I love what you teach us! I'm thankful for what you teach us! I enjoy sharing what you teach us!
My Wife: "Watchya watchin'?"
Me: "Nothing..."
My Wife: "Fine, be that way."
Me: "No, but.... Look it's about.."
My Wife: * stomps off and slams the door *
Lol 😂
I cannot tell you how deeply grateful I am that you made this video. Thank you! 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻
This reminds me of one dream, a black hole was shooting through the sky and with each time it was closer and closer until it swallowed everything(me including) and I felt... noting? death? I have no way to put it in words, I was just feeling without being able to create any conscious thought
Which off course is too much something to be nothing but strange enough. Your dream ran into trouble trying to represent real nothing, but you were still there. Imagine 10^500 failed universes in the multiverse all without observers. How could they ever be said to be real? Imagine not even one universe, no observers, just nothing. I can't imagine that either.
I was thinking about number systems today, and voila, you uploaded. Thanks Joe! Much love xx
The closest thing to 'nothing', is the classification of concepts that can't exist physically. Absolute Zero, a perfect vacuum, energy removed/destroyed from the universe, etc.
Also since concepts can be created, but not destroyed (since the information now exists, but it can be lost/forgotten), time generally goes forward.
There was a story I once read involving a group of people getting trapped in a hypercube shaped like a house. One person looks out a window and see's nothing. The story takes a moment to explain that what they see isn't blackness or a pure white space, but nothing at all. It's a mind breaking exercise... like imagine transparency with nothing beyond it, forever...
Was it "And He Built a Crooked House” by Robert Heinlein?
Title please?
@@UATU. I think it might be. I read that years ago.
Nothing. Not black, like the color you see when you close your eyes. Nothing, like the color you see out of your knee.
Hah! I thought of this idea myself years ago. :) Another way of conceptualizing it that I came up with was to imagine the whole universe without color - and in this case white and black are also colors. Both approaches paint the same picture, except you can't actually imagine that picture!
It has various meanings, and it depends on the context it is being use. However, it cannot escape that the moment you define it, "something" encompasses it. It is still an information, a kind of configuration, a phenomenon.
Your videos are not only educational, but also aesthetic and funny, one of the best channels
I've been thinking about this a lot. Differences is very important. Temperature, density, such as the ocean, then air, then space.. differences are necessary for every action in nature to occur.
Entropy is crazy too. If you have a bunch of "same", it doesn't do anything. But if you have a bunch of "difference", things happen until it is all "same". That's probably the easiest way I can explain how literally everything in existence works.
Nothingness, or just Nothing is so powerful, that it really has the power of Absolute Infinity.
I think the best example of nothing is probably a shadow. Since a shadow is just the absence of light
"Well, it's when people call out at you just as you're going off to do it, 'What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?' and you say, 'Oh, Nothing,' and then you go and do it.
It means just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."
"Oh!" said Pooh
3:05 hey hey hey! Aryabhatta invented zero ( from India )
Okay you mention it later
You mean discovered
@@rohdx I would say invented coz he did not find out something which was originally there. Like for india , vasco da gama discovered india - the country was originally there . But zero as a digit was not
@@idmeghaburnwal yup ok
Aristotle thought that if an object moved through nothing, it would move infinitely fast.
That's kind of true if you consider the Higgs field the final "something". So good job, Aristotle!
Nothing can’t exist because “nothing” implies no-thing. You can’t have something without nothing, and you can’t have nothing without something. One implies the other and are forever married to one another.
Who ever invented the zero ....Thanks for nothing!
Indians..
Kid: I wanna watch Vsauce
Mom: We have Vsauce at home
Vsauce at home:
If it started from nothing, then there must be already something in existence before everything who has no beginning and end. The source of everything.
"There's no such thing as nothing" :- Werner Karl Heisenberg
Was he certain about that?
@@TheRealMirCat nothing is certain
"God does not play dice with the universe"
Who are you to tell God what he can and cannot do".
That was the question which pops in my head all the time for no reason „what is nothing“?
The glass is always full of something, nothing is just an idea. Zero doesn’t exist.
0:36 woa woa hold on zero isn't nothing, it's Identity element in summation on some major sets and can be called "nothing" in that sense but, have you multipled by nothing? you get nothing! that's prettty big imo
Nothing of what you said made sense xD
(yet kinda did, just did it for the giggles ;) )
0 is the first element in an array in most programming languages :)
@@juliaf_ u mean first object? hahaha
My creative writing professor challenged us to write an easy about nothing. Way way back then it was English 212. Yea, not possible and I was one of only a few who realized this. So she told me to defend. I say, once you put the first letter it becomes something. She didn’t give grades so I got what she called a credit. Nothingness is impossible. Even in a void with absence of all atoms and virtual particles is still something because humans can perceive darkness.
Great video! Gotta be a pedant for a sec 🙂
Unless I’m mistaken, pi was originally thought of, not as circumference to diameter, but as the ratio of the AREA of a circle to the area of a SQUARE with a side length equal to the radius. Hence the area formula. I remember this when I brought up tau to my history of math professor.
Though, of course, pi was not the standard/conventional symbol until much later.
Software developers have a quite good definition of "nothing". We differentiate between 0, which is a legit number and null. I think most people have seen the error message "NullReferenceException". This always happens when something specific is supposed to be accessed but the requested object does not exist (returns null) and the developer forgot to implement a proper handling for such an error.
Another example is when you have a list of specific objects, let's say fruits. You let the computer search "how many oranges are there in this list?". If it returns 0 it simply means there are no oranges but if it returns null it means something went wrong and the whole list does not even exist.
Reminded me of a poem I wrote which was basically me wondering if nothing and something were equal or not. Thanks to past humans messing with us, now, nothing exists.
"Nothing is what rocks dream about"
- Aristotle
I’ve had this conversation with myself a thousand times. Interesting to hear it verbalized.
Same we are turning VSAUCE
Friend: "Hey, what are you doing?"
Me: "Watching a video about nothing"
Me: Yes we learnt a lot about nothing....
Me too: Wait what?
But
Thanks Dr Joe and team. ❤💜💙
Just a tip. Try and say "Also me:", just because it sounds more fluid.
But other then that, I get what you mean ;)
Has this show gotten more oriented toward kids over time? The simplistic explanations about dark matter and about what happens around absolute 0, compared to say, what one might hear on Vsauce, Kurzgesagt or even SciShow, made me realize this content seems particularly suited for younger learners.
I can't help but compare this channel's current format to Vsauce's. (at least when I used to watch it)
@@Pottery4Life The thing is that vsauce focused on having their own spin on obscure topics and/or obscure presentations of common topics, all with a splash of weird humour.
This channels is more like, Dora the Explorer for teenagers, just stating a chain of easily accessible info in a further simplified, slightly opinionated format.
I was thinking a more "dumbed down" veritasium(sp?)
Plus, Vsauce, Kurzgesagt and Veritasium are still among the more accessible channels, suitable for intelligent and curious tweens. I didn't even mention the likes of PBS Space Time, 3Blue1Brown or Numberphile... Anyway, my goal was not to disparage the content of this channel. After a while without watching their videos, I was just checking whether I should still consider myself part of their target audience.
@@JCUDOS I agree with the fact that it seems more kid-oriented now than before. Compare, for example the episode of how the Covid vaccine was developed. While he glossed over complicated things there as well, I didn’t feel like he was a second grade teacher giving a math lesson. I taught 2nd grade a number of years ago, and this is a video I would feel very comfortable showing in my class.
"This is a video about nothing"
My brain: Engage Seinfeld theme!!
It’s what was wrong with my ex-girlfriend constantly.
9:26 is this what quantum physicist say like " everything is made out of wave, it just become a particle when we observe them, or the wave function collapse to a single point when observed "?? Physics are hellof confusing 😅
Observation by a conscious being is not what's required or necessary. Even in a complete vaccuum numerous quantum fields exist. A perturbation of a field can create a 'wavicle' given all perturbations of any of these numerous fields are both particle and wave at the same time (no equivalent thing exists in our classical realm but thousands of tests prove this is a definitive thing in the quantum realm). Any interaction of one wavicle with another one will result in a wave collapse...no observation necessary. In turn, this is how energy coalesces into physical matter which latter provides the building blocks for complexity.
i would like to thank you for making this video. this actually helped me a lot.
1:48 Do we really need that!? It hit hard on me!
13:22 I don't know why I laugh out loud here.
Mr stark i dont feel so good 🕺🏽
I can think in nothing. I do it when I want to sleep. I just concentrate on what I'm hearing (cars going by in the distance, mostly) while shutting down my internal monologe (which is hard to do when I'm anxious for example). But I can shut down my brain if it's necessary.
Good trick to know.
5:15 I know you didn't do it intentionally but the pronunciation is SHUnya
It really hurts me that you didn't mentioned Aryabhatta when taking about origin of Zero
Because you are a self centered ignorant who believes anything he heard since his childhood.... Go and do some research....
Aryabhatta 5th century, earlier use of Shunya 3rd or 4th century in some sanskrit manuscript. Do maybe it was a Hindu scientist before Aryabhatta. All this is in the video.
Fantastic episode and narration/script. Thanks!
Add one more question : If 0 means and is nothing then what are -1,-2,-3..... which lies beyond nothing ? 🤯
they are something once again
negative numbers might represent parallel universe to ours and zero is point of contact
@@AB-dx1co I thought it meant debt. After paying debt your wealth becomes 0.
@@somratkhan8688 exactly! Negative numbers mean the absence of something that should be there, in a simple sense. Its basically just attaching a value to the amount of nothing you have and how to get to the point of something
Like Aristotle said,"Nothing is what rocks dream about".
If your trying to define nothing more than that, then its something.
If i say i eat nothing for lunch, i literally eat nothing for lunch.
I do not eat something called nothing for lunch.
The contents of the empty set.
Zero on the other hand is a quantity that quantifies the size of the empty set.
gave me some real vsauce vibes