The Steel Guitar Forum

Now in the East end of London we would say NUFINK.

b0b wrote:There's more nothing than anything else in the universe.

b0b, I believe that to be, "not true".
Space is something, just as mass is something.
We incorrectly assume space to be just a void containing various pieces of mass.
Space exists because of the mass. It has shape that is controlled by mass.
If all mass were to disappear, space would disappear along with the disappearance of the mass.
If the universe disappeared nothing would disappear too.
Nothing is an invention of the human mind. It is not I who holds the patent.


I hope this minor conflict does not mean our friendship will also disappear and that I am permanently ban from the SGF.

This just came to me in the middle of a beer:

There is no such thing as the absence of everything. There is always something to take the place that has been vacated. It does not matter if we realize it or not.

Here in the Ozark's we say "Nuttin Honey".

Where I come from we say "nunk", as has been mentioned several times in this discussion. In fact everything that we write nowadays has already been mentioned. I've been following this tab since it first started and I remember what has been said before. No newcomer would have the patience to read it all. The concept of the "vacuum" of space has been discussed several times, as has the existence of dark matter, and even the idea that if you remove everything something will come in to fill it. On Earth, of course, that would be air. In space it would be space dust, light particles, etc.

Which brings up another point. If someone had a transporter as in Star Trek, or a time machine, when they were beamed out of the location they were in, there would be a loud bang as the air rushed in to fill the vacuum. What's more, in the location to where they were beamed, there would be a nuclear explosion as the atoms attempted to occupy a space already occupied by something, even if that space was full of air.

And talking about time machines; if you went forward in time for even a few minutes, you wouldn't stay in the same location. During the few minutes you skipped, the Earth will have moved hundreds of miles, and it will have rotated on its axis. You would be lucky if you ended up suspended in space. You're just as likely to end up deep below the Earth's surface. Either way you wouldn't survive the trip.

"What does that have to do with ghosts?" you say. I'm coming to that. If a ghost can pass through walls, why doesn't it fall through the floor? In fact, the ghost must have some mass in order to stay where it is, or the Earth would move around with it. That haunted castle wasn't in the same location in space when the nasty deeds were done there. So the ghosts must be able to cling to the Earth.

And that has NOTHING to do with the space taken up by the ghost when it moves.

Rick, you misunderstood what I said. You equate nothing with space. I said nothing about space - I spoke only of nothing.

If the universe disappeared nothing would disappear too.

While it's true that space would disappear, nothing would survive.

Hey...it's Friday the 13th !! Maybe NOTHING will happen today !!

Bob, I think I understand somewhat now. Nothing "Will Survive". .... It will survive...right? This is good brain exercise. I don't know what other benefits it has but it is fun and that's all that counts with me.

Nothing has changed.

It took a while.

I think you got it, Rick. Nothing is bigger than the universe.

Here we go again. It's a matter of semantics and punctuation, which accounts for about 125 of the 129 pages, so I shall point out again what has been pointed out many times before.

"Nothing is bigger than the universe," means that there is not anything that is bigger than the Universe.
That is patently true, since if there were anything bigger than the universe then, by defitinition, it would be included in the universe.

"'Nothing' is bigger than the universe," means that the absence of anything, or the word 'nothing', is bigger than the universe. That is obviously untrue.

It's a matter of usage of the English language, and in most of the posts we are intentionally taking a sentence which is written to mean one thing and intentionally interpreting the word "nothing" in a sense in which it was not meant by the person who wrote it.

To add to the confusion, when you bring in the word "universe" you are picking a word which has a common meaning and a scientific meaning. The common meaning is "everything and everywhere", but the scientific meaning, which makes little sense to me, but is used by scientists at large, is "everything within our perspective". They have even gone to extent in saying that nothing can move faster than the speed of light, so anything beyond the distance that could have been travelled at the speed of light since the Big Bang is outside of our universe. By their definition there could be multiple universes. If there were continual Big Bangs, but far enough apart that they could not interact with each other, then there would be multiple universes. but in the same dimension. Think of it this way. The Big Bang put out an enormous amount of energy, which is continually being changed to matter and/or dissipated. After a certain distance has been travelled, the universe could start retracting in on itself. If another universe had a Big Bang but was too far out to ever come into contact with ours, it too would go through the same process. It would be like millions of sparks going on and off.

When cosmologists refer to the "expanding universe" they are using the scientific meaning of "universe". They are not saying that the dimensions of space are increasing, they are saying that the volume of space taken up by out universe is expanding. The assumption is that beyond our universe is a complete void where nothing exists. That may or may not be true. I tend to think it untrue, but there is no way we shall ever know.

Well good gosh Girtie, I guess I was wrong, we have not run out of nothing....the last 13 post are tried and true evidence, and I must tell "ya'll" that sure is refreshing.

It seems to me that space flows through everything because it's nothing. Thus everything moves through space. It's fixed, being infinite.

Thank you, it was nothing...

b0b wrote:While it's true that space would disappear, nothing would survive.

Nothing exists only in the human mind. The human mind exists ultimately in space.

And:
Often used is the statement, "nothing could be farther from the truth".
I believe that each and every thing that is not the truth to all be equidistant from the truth.
Male bovine fecal matter, the ever popular bold-faced-lie, and nothing __ all lie on the outer end of their respective equal radii, which encircle the central truth.

I got nothing in high school. I am 66 and getting nothing now. But no lie, in between this I got plenty. OMG Rick Collins is right: The Bull**** does encircle the central truth".

Rick Collins wrote:Nothing exists only in the human mind.

Nothing is in my mind? Whoa! That's deep!

Suppose Willie would have sang NOTHING on my mind had Barbara Walters took him up on smoking weed?

What happened to my COKE-N-HAM ?? There's NOTHING left !!

Then there's the other meaning of "Nothing," an absence of "Hing".
NOT HING.

I asked my dog, "What's the square root of 25, plus 10. minus 15."
And, he said NOTHING.
...dumb dog __ should have said zero.

Ahhhh !! We're back in the HING Dynasty...that's something isn't it ?? It's Not ?? Not Hing ??

There should not even be a definition of the word "Nothing". The fact that there is a definition validates the existence of nothing.

And we now have NOTHING occupying 130 pages!

Rick Nicklas wrote:There should not even be a definition of the word "Nothing". The fact that there is a definition validates the existence of nothing.

Proof that nothing exists!

Yes, "nothing" exists as a word.
The absence of anything exists as a concept.

As has been mentioned before, what do the following words all have in common?

nothing
cold
death
darkness
stillness
nobody
no-one
emptiness

They're all "concept" nouns, which don't represent a thing, just the absence of it. In these cases, the absence of thing, heat, life, light, motion, body, one and fullness.

For instance, "cold" does not exist. You can say "50 degrees of heat", but you can't say "50 degrees of cold" because heat is something that exists and has an absolute minimum (its absence) but no maximum.

Here's an old schoolboys' algebra conundrum.

Let x =1
Therefore:-
x²-1 = x²-x

Factorize both sides and you get:-
(x-1)(x+1) = x(x-1)

Divide both sides by (x-1):-
x+1 = x

Deduct x from both sides
1 = 0



Yes, I do know the fallacy. I speak fluent Algebra.