Could somebody explain to me what 'nothing' is?

[Moancy]

So I've been reading up on some basic stuff about the big bang. Something really stopped me in my tracks though and I can't seem to get my head around it.

"After 35 years of looking backward, he says, he’s found that before our universe there was nothing, nothing at all, not even time itself."

What would nothing be? How could I better understand nothing. I thought, hey, it must be black. But black is a color so it couldn't be black because that wouldn't be nothing.

[Moancy]

I also wanted to talk about aliens because there is no way, with all these stars and planets out there that there isn't other intelligent life. I just hope they aren't like lizard people because that would be ******** freaky. I'm sure they'd be evil too.

[Inactive1234567890]

I hope someone can answer her question for her.

[Vannak]

Its important to get a few things straight when we talk about nothing: Our brains senses aren't turned to absolute scales. "Black" isn't an objective color, its the sensation when the light around us goes lower than a certain level. Black is the sensation of the absence of light. If you could some how exist within "nothing" (you can't) then it would probably look black, but that's just because black is what your brain calls it when it sees less and less. It would be the ultimate black.

Anyways, "Black" is a feature of our brains- its not a fact about the universe.

So basically, when it comes to the universe, we noticed that the universe kind of has these layers, like a bed. We call these layers "fields", and basically every kind of particle is a different sheet on the bed, while the mattress what we call space-time.

These layers include particles electrons and the quarks that make up protons, they include the "light" sheet, made up of photons. Then there's the mattress, space and time. When most people think of nothing, they think of ripping all the sheets off: No particles. But in fact, we can tell that the bed at some point was made too.

Now, what I'm about to say might sound like its "something", but we basically think that the universe is some expression of a particular mathematical object. Because the object we're talking about IS NOT made of particles, experiences no forces, has no time or space with which to change in, this thing is definitely not an actual object.

A good way to think about nothing is that it is which can be taken away. In this case, we've taken away all the particles, all the forces, and all of space and time away. "Before the big bang", as far as it means anything, refers to this original object from which the universe came, with out stuff or forces or space or time. That's a pretty good "nothing".

[CrackSpade]

"Nothing" is, literally, an absence of anything. It's hard for people to generally conceptualise, because like you, they think of "darkness", or more space, or even negative space, like a vacuum, but that's also not correct. Like, think of an apple. In your hand you have one apple. Once you eat that apple, you have nothing (or to be pedantic, no more apples) left in your hand. Sort of see where I'm getting at? Nothing is a state of non-existence.

[Horton and the Who]

The Big Bang

[Vannak]

Sahi Kati

I also wanted to talk about aliens because there is no way, with all these stars and planets out there that there isn't other intelligent life. I just hope they aren't like lizard people because that would be ******** freaky. I'm sure they'd be evil too.

Oh on this as well.

As far as aliens go, its really absurd to think that there ISNT life out there. Even if the universe is a much smaller, younger place than we think, and every thing we think is a galaxy is really a star, the odds still are enormously in favor of extra terresterial life.

Intelligent life, however, may be much more rare, we don't know.

What I think we do know is that if there are other civilizations out there, they probably aren't going to really do us harm. First off all, the universe is really big and you really need something valuable to go after if you're going to travel outside your solar system, or a revolution in the way we understand physics.

And the plain fact is that the stuff we have here on earth is basically everywhere. We don't really have special atoms or molecules or anything like that.