Physicists Debate the Many Varieties of Nothingness

What is nothing ? Sounds like a simple question-- nothing is simply the absence of something, of course --until you begin to think about it. The other night the American Museum of Natural History hosted its 14 th annual Asimov Memorial Debate , which featured five leading thinkers opining (and sparring , sometimes testily, but more on that later) about the nature of nothing ."Nothing is the most important part of the universe," said Lawrence Krauss , a physicist at Arizona State University and author of the recent " A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing ." Of course we can imagine the (mostly) empty space between galaxies as being a sort of nothing. But we should also remember that most of the space around us is empty--even an atom is mostly empty space between the nucleus and electrons. [More]