I'm Steve Strogatz, and this is the Joy of Why, a podcast from Quantum Magazine that takes you into some of the biggest unanswered questions in math and science today.

In this episode, we're going to ask, does nothingness exist? Philosophers and scientists have long debated whether nothingness is even possible. Aristotle,

for instance, argued that a perfect vacuum could never exist, because if it did, objects moving

through it wouldn't encounter any resistance and hence could travel infinitely fast. And 2,000 years

later, when the boy genius Blaise Pascal proposed that it might be possible

to create a vacuum by sucking all the air out of a closed container, René Descartes shot back.

It seems to me that the young man who wrote this booklet has a little too much emptiness in his head.

Still, to most of us, the idea of a vacuum sounds reasonable. If you take a

container, seal it tight, and somehow remove everything inside, well, it sure seems like there

could be nothing left in there. But can we really call it nothing? After all, there could still

be energy inside, or perhaps subatomic matter and particles that

we just can't see.

In modern physics, this idea of nothingness has been making a comeback.

In fact, it turns out to be the basis of every theory of something.

Nothing nowadays is something.

Are you confused yet?

Well, here to help us sort all of this out is

Isabel Garcia Garcia. She's a theoretical physicist currently at both New York University

and the Institute for Advanced Study. She's looked at everything from the bubble of nothing to the

interplay between particle physics and gravity. Isabel, thanks so much for joining us today to tell us a little something about nothing.

Thank you for having me.

Oh, well, it's a great pleasure to have a chance to meet you and chat with you.

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