Nothing comes from nothing
Encyclopedia
Nothing comes from nothing is a philosophical expression of a thesis first argued by Parmenides
Parmenides
Parmenides of Elea was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. The single known work of Parmenides is a poem, On Nature, which has survived only in fragmentary form. In this poem, Parmenides...

. It is associated with ancient Greek
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

 cosmology, such as presented not just in the opus of Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...

 and Hesiod
Hesiod
Hesiod was a Greek oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and...

, but also in virtually every philosophical system – there is no time interval in which a world didn't exist, since it couldn't be created ex nihilo in the first place. Note that Greeks also believed that things cannot disappear into nothing, just as they can't be created from nothing, but if they ceased to exist, they transform into some other form of being. We can trace this idea to the teaching of Empedocles
Empedocles
Empedocles was a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Agrigentum, a Greek city in Sicily. Empedocles' philosophy is best known for being the originator of the cosmogenic theory of the four Classical elements...

. Today the idea is loosely associated with the laws of conservation of mass
Conservation of mass
The law of conservation of mass, also known as the principle of mass/matter conservation, states that the mass of an isolated system will remain constant over time...

 and energy
Conservation of energy
The nineteenth century law of conservation of energy is a law of physics. It states that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. The total energy is said to be conserved over time...

.

De Rerum Natura

The Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius
Lucretius
Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is an epic philosophical poem laying out the beliefs of Epicureanism, De rerum natura, translated into English as On the Nature of Things or "On the Nature of the Universe".Virtually no details have come down concerning...

 expressed this principle in his first book of De Rerum Natura (eng. title On the Nature of Things)

Principium cuius hinc nobis exordia sumet,

nullam rem e nihilo gigni divinitus umquam.


English translation:

But only Nature's aspect and her law,

Which, teaching us, hath this exordium:

Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.


He then continues on discussing how matter is required to make matter and that objects cannot spring forth without reasonable cause.

Nam si de nihilo fierent, ex omnibus rebus

omne genus nasci posset, nil semine egeret.

e mare primum homines, e terra posset oriri

squamigerum genus et volucres erumpere caelo;


English translation

Suppose all sprang from all things: any kind

Might take its origin from any thing,

No fixed seed required. Men from the sea

Might rise, and from the land the scaly breed,

And, fowl full fledged come bursting from the sky;

King Lear

In William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

's King Lear
King Lear
King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The title character descends into madness after foolishly disposing of his estate between two of his three daughters based on their flattery, bringing tragic consequences for all. The play is based on the legend of Leir of Britain, a mythological...

,
the king says, "Nothing will come of nothing" to his daughter Cordelia, meaning that as long as she says nothing to flatter him, she will receive nothing from him. Later, Lear nearly repeats the line, saying, "Nothing can be made out of nothing" (Act 1.1 and Act 1.4 respectively).

"KING LEAR: ..what can you say to draw

A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak.

CORDELIA: Nothing, my lord.

KING LEAR: Nothing?!

CORDELIA: Nothing.

KING LEAR: Nothing will come of nothing, speak again.

The Sound of Music

In Rodgers and Hammerstein
Rodgers and Hammerstein
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II were a well-known American songwriting duo, usually referred to as Rodgers and Hammerstein. They created a string of popular Broadway musicals in the 1940s and 1950s during what is considered the golden age of the medium...

's The Sound of Music (film)
The Sound of Music (film)
Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music is a 1965 American musical film directed by Robert Wise and starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. The film is based on the Broadway musical The Sound of Music, with songs written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, and with the musical...

as Captain Von Trapp sings the song Something Good they both sing the line "Nothing comes from nothing nothing ever could" in reference to their childhood's influence on their relationship.

Modern physics

The law of conservation of energy
Conservation of energy
The nineteenth century law of conservation of energy is a law of physics. It states that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. The total energy is said to be conserved over time...

 state that no energy is created nor destroyed, it merely changes form. A zero-energy universe
Zero-energy Universe
The zero-energy universe hypothesis states that the total amount of energy in the universe is exactly zero. When the energy of the universe is considered from a pseudo-tensor point of view, zero values are obtained in the resulting calculations...

 hypothesis states that the total amount of energy in the universe is exactly zero. That is the only kind of universe that could come from nothing. Such a universe needs to be flat, a state which does not contradict current observations that the Universe is flat with a 0.5% margin of error.

See also

  • Antimetabole
    Antimetabole
    In rhetoric, antimetabole is the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in transposed grammatical order...

  • Empedocles
    Empedocles
    Empedocles was a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Agrigentum, a Greek city in Sicily. Empedocles' philosophy is best known for being the originator of the cosmogenic theory of the four Classical elements...

  • Higgs boson
    Higgs boson
    The Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive elementary particle that is predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. Its existence is postulated as a means of resolving inconsistencies in the Standard Model...

  • Spontaneous symmetry breaking
    Spontaneous symmetry breaking
    Spontaneous symmetry breaking is the process by which a system described in a theoretically symmetrical way ends up in an apparently asymmetric state....

  • Vacuum energy
    Vacuum energy
    Vacuum energy is an underlying background energy that exists in space even when the space is devoid of matter . The concept of vacuum energy has been deduced from the concept of virtual particles, which is itself derived from the energy-time uncertainty principle...

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