Too much build-up leading to nothing
Nothing, or nothing-ness, is a topic intuitively difficult to grasp. Surrounded by everyday machineries – people, electronic devices, buildings – it is relatively easy to imagine what it would be like when all of these things are removed – when all the matter, along with the air, is removed. We call it a vacuum, but it still contains electromagnetic waves and gravity waves (if they exist).
To get a grip on true nothingness, we have to remove even those fields from that space – only then can we even hope to start delving into our quest of understanding nothingness.
Naturally, when I picked up the book, I was more interested in finding answers to questions like – what does it mean for something to exist, how can something arise from nothing, does empty space have nothingness or does it have other additional characteristics, and the like. I knew most of these questions would ultimately lead me into the quantum world, and the fluctuations that characterise even seemingly empty space. The answer to nothingness lies there.
To my utter dismay, however, the author spent nearly seventy percent of the book’s length in building up to the topic. It is, finally, around page 100 that the quantum weirdness is first taken up for discussion. For a book of three or four hundred pages, it could have been tolerated. But for a book which doesn’t even reach 150 pages, this was inexcusable.
We find ourselves reading a short history of the development of science since Newton. Newtonian mechanics, concept of ether, electromagnetic theory, Michelson-Morley experiment and rejection of ether, quantum theory, Einstein’s radical thought experiment of catching up with a light-wave, and his special and general theories of relativity. Barring a few anecdotes in the first few pages, I learnt absolutely nothing in those hundred pages. What an irony it was.
Additionally, and it could be because of the sheer nature of the topic covered, there is a marked difference in the degrees of difficulty in the earlier and the later parts of the book. The earlier part can be understood even by children who have just entered the teens, but the later part requires much more mental dexterity which I clearly didn’t have. Whether I could have understood it if the author had spent more time in explaining what all was happening, is open to debate.
I feel a lot more time should have been spent in discussing the nothing-ness itself – the weird quantum world where the answers to the above questions lie. The author discusses it in the last one-third part of the book, but my dejection from the previous chapters prevented me from getting too involved with what I was reading.
All in all, the book misses the woods in trying to name the various trees it can see. The idea of nothingness is not discussed to the degree that was expected and that prevents the good parts of the book, where they do come, from having the effect they otherwise would have had.
What could have been a brilliant book turned out to be just about average, principally because there is a dissonance between the book’s title, and its content.