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The television sitcom Seinfeld was a cultural phenomenon—one of the most wildly successful shows in the history of television. Part of Seinfeld's peculiar charm—its "schtick"—was that it was a show about nothing, and it managed to turn this into a marketing device. Of course Seinfeld wasn't really about nothing, it simply lacked the standard plot framework possessed by sibling shows and often drew its comedic strength from trivia. But, by traditional yardsticks, something normally present was missing—thus the claim to be about nothing.

The Seinfeldian sense of nothing is the common usage. A show without a standard plot is about "nothing." Likewise, someone without a plan is doing "nothing" on Friday night. A writer between projects is working on "nothing." A bored child has "nothing" to do. A detective who comes up dry has "nothing." The SETI program has found "nothing." A tale told by an idiot signifies "nothing."

The absence of an anticipated element is often described as "nothing." This very familiar usage is rarely confusing to ordinary people, but it is certainly imprecise, colloquial, and unsatisfactory to philosophers.

Philosophers, it turns out, have always been fascinated by nothing. The classical Greeks were intrigued by nothing and invented a variety of ingenious arguments to prove that nothing could not exist. Their most enduring legacy was Aristotle's pithy aphorism, horror vacui—"Nature abhors a vacuum." Theologians have also put their spin on nothing. Determined to lay waste to the notion that God created the world out of some uncooperative material, they developed the now familiar doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. God created out of nothing.

Physicists are also intrigued by nothing. Their nothing is empty space, and they have long observed, experimented, and theorized about whether space can be truly empty. The historical intuition was negative, consistent with the Aristotelian tradition out of which modern science arose. Space was filled with an "ether"—an all-purpose material that accomplished a variety of things, from carrying light waves to eliminating the need to fret about horror vacui.

Currently physicists—or, more precisely, cosmologists—are carefully, and at considerable expense, investigating nothing. Their motivation is to understand the first moments of the Big Bang, when there was almost nothing. As one runs the proverbial cosmic clock in reverse, back to those truly prehistoric times when the universe was, say, less than a minute old, it seems apparent that nothing is just over the horizon, to use a metaphor strangely out of place.

Approaching the "ultimate" beginning at t=0, the universe becomes devoid of matter—there are no particles. There is only energy. And then there is no energy—only energy fluctuations. Are we closing in on nothing?

Alas, there are serious limits to our understanding of the first moment of the universe. We lack the exotic experimental cathedrals to model this moment of creation, and our high priests—the theoretical physicists—as yet have no platonic revelation to guide us convincingly into the light. We will never build the experimental cathedrals—calculations show that they would have to bigger than the earth—but we could get a revelation from the robed theorists. At least that is what they are promising.

For ambitious readers interested in the history of nothing, Professor Nick Hug get from the University of Illinois at Chicago has assembled a marvelous reader entitled Space from Zeno to Einstein. The book is a collection of 17 historically important readings with commentary.

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