Nothing

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (October 2024) Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 2,064 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Nichts]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Nichts}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Nothing, no-thing, or no thing, is the complete absence of anything as the opposite of something and an antithesis of everything. The concept of nothing has been a matter of philosophical debate since at least the 5th century BC. Early Greek philosophers argued that it was impossible for nothing to exist. The atomists allowed nothing but only in the spaces between the invisibly small atoms. For them, all space was filled with atoms. Aristotle took the view that there exists matter and there exists space, a receptacle into which matter objects can be placed. This became the paradigm for classical scientists of the modern age like Newton. Nevertheless, some philosophers, like Descartes, continued to argue against the existence of empty space until the scientific discovery of a physical vacuum.

Existentialists like Sartre and Heidegger (as interpreted by Sartre) have associated nothing with consciousness. Some writers have made connections between Heidegger's concept of nothing and the nirvana of Eastern religions.

Modern science does not equate vacuum with nothing. The vacuum in quantum field theory is filled with virtual particles.^[1][2] The quantum vacuum is often viewed as a modern version of an aether theory.