Originally Posted By: Orac
Now here is another slippery slope can I define nothing because if nothing is a hard fixed the answer is no and obviously so.


This quickly becomes one of those circular arguments that goes nowhere. Asking to define nothing is a cop-out. You cannot define nothing, other than as a complete absence of anything, which really does nothing other than rephrase the original. All that is achieved by this is avoidance of the original question. This is clever in a “pissing contest” but gets nowhere in any real discussion.

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However lets take money scenario you can have nothing but you can borrow some create more pay back the original and then have money.


In the same way that science legitimately uses infinite to approximate a very large number, your use of “nothing” in this context is purely symbolic. In the context of whether or not there can ever have been nothing, it is yet another cop-out.

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The real problem you are chasing I think Bill S is not nothing but can one borrow in physics and does borrowing imply that there is not nothing behind it


I’m not sure that I understand this. What I think you are saying is that if you have nothing, you can borrow something, then, where there was nothing there is now something. If that’s right, I might as well drop out of this discussion, because we are talking about two different things and there seems to be no way we can align our subjects. If there is nothing, there is nothing, there is nothing to borrow and no one to do the borrowing or lending.

It has been pointed out to me that “nothing” is not a scientific concept. “Scientists do not deal with nothing”. Fair enough. It is for scientists to define the boundaries of science. All I would say is that unless scientists are willing to give some thought to the concepts of nothingness and infinity they are unlikely even to come close to considering the origin of the cosmos, there will always be infinite regression.

There never was nothing.