Hi all! I have a free science newsletter that goes out once per week to which you can subscribe here sabinehossenfelder.com/newsletter/ If you have a topic for a video to suggest, the best way is to reply to the newsletter. I *do* read as many comments as I can. But, well, it's kind of hard to keep track.

Imagine half a million members coming here for nothing.

"Virtual particle pairs are like couples you've never heard of that pop up in your newsfeed, destroy each other and disappear back into nothing, … except with maths" - This one killed me, thanks Sabine!

I understood nothing and I absolutely loved every second of it.

"Like most videos on KZfaq, this video is about nothing." That has to be the most accurate thing I've ever heard

These jokes being delivered with her somber, straight-faced demeanor is my kind of humor

this is the cutest thought experiment I've heard in a while, you literally just wanted to give your friend an absolute nothing box to make them happy for their birthday. It might break everything in the universe but atleast you gave your friend what they wanted :)

Thank You, Sabine, for treating varying philosophies and beliefs with respect, as you in fact continue helping all groups learn more, and even become more excited about science. :)

Hi Sabine, Thanks for Nothing! Loved your video which helps clarify how little most of us actually know about Nothing even though we may use the term frequently (and frequently inaccurately). I've been working on my own personal philosophy working from 'Nothing' and starting on up from there. So, imagine Nothing is ALL there is, no matter, mass, energy, observers, observations, interactions, just limitless, completely empty of everything Nothing. Nothing is the ONLY 'thing' the only one 'thing' (or is that none thing?) This would be indistinguishable from a uniform limitless 'thing' that is constant universally. Nothing then is nothing, one thing and everything, all at the same time. And if that were the true case then we don't exist and we are all just figments of Nothing's imagination - which it could not have as that destroys the concept of no observation or observations etc. Also if Nothing and One thing are indistinguishable from each other there could then be a minimum of two 'things' and we could in theory go on to have an infinite number of 'One Things' that are unlimited by time or distance and none of them would be able to interact with any of the others. But what if one thing was the exact opposite of Nothing and for some reason they were inextricably bound together... I wonder what the result might be?

Sabine is the only person I’d tune into to hear about nothing.

Pulling so much content from nothing is really something. Keep up the great work!

As someone who has occasionally felt compelled to read a bit into ontology, this was one of the most interesting explorations of this subject I've encountered.

Love your channel, your content and the honest delivery spiced with dry humour Sabine. I remember a period in the '80s when physics and eastern philosophy/religion started dating. (I think) Fritjof Capra started it with 'The Tao of Physics'. There were others as well such as Gary Zukav's "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" . Books such as these were generally entertaining/thoughtful without going too von Daniken in how they presented their material. This reminded me how much I enjoyed the intersection of physics and philosophy.

I spent half of the video laughing. Both at the non-chalant delivery of humor, and the absolutely absurd directions I would never have imagined going myself. I mean that as compliment - she kept subverting my expectations all I could do was enjoy the ride. Brilliant combination of education and entertainment.

It's amazing that Sabine has the ability to make us think very deeply about nothing at all. Now that, is something!

There is still something in the box: the 9th level of nothing is in the box. They said they wanted nothing for their birthday but you gave them something that has at least a definition. We can talk about it so clearly it is something :)

Thanks Sabine. You explain very deep and complex things with clarity and an infectious energy!

Sabine is getting better and better- hilariously scientific and scientifically hilarious. Don’t you just love her! She’s fabulous. This video on nothing must be one of her best ones.

The paradox that keeps me up at night isn't the notion of nothing, but rather how Sabine can be so ordinary in her delivery, and yet produce such engaging content at the same time. (I promise this is a compliment, haha - great video!)

You did a really good job of explaining it, you broke down every concept and made it easier for some to understand. "True nothing" is the absence of all concepts and possibilities, therefore "nothing" will never exist, and there will always be something, there is no conceivable possibilities that allow "nothing" to exist.

I've been binging your channel since I've discovered it a few days ago. I love how you give every idea a fair chance! I also have a subject request: would you be interested in covering the idea of "Elektrosmog"? Somebody I know claims to be very sensitive to it, and I am sceptical about the whole concept (not her symptoms, but the way she attributes them to electromagnetic pollution or whatever). But since I've watched your video on 5G, I think that maybe I shouldn't dismiss her idea off-hand.

4:15 -- the best part of Sabine's humor is that it is as on point as it is unexpected

Video: "Nothing" 90k people: "Hmm, interesting."

Hello Sabine. This is by far one my favorite episodes. Thank you. I've had an idea rattling around my brain for a couple of decades now, that this episode seems to validate in some fashion. My thought experiment suggests that when you have nothing, you are left with nothing but possibility. I think you said as much also. Then I wondered if in the absence of time, presumably the condition prior to the big bang, if an "infinite amount of time" is actually indistinguishable from "instantaneousness." If we could agree on that, then given just the possibility of a particle popping into existence out of nothing would be a 100 percent surety since all other possibilities (like nothing happening at all for instance) will have been exhausted -- throughout an infinite eternity of nothing happening having played itself out. In my mind, the instant "nothingness" is achieved somehow, "somethingness" must instantaneously show up to fill the void. I'd love to hear some future thoughts that explore this further. ps. Love your videos. Alles gute, Uwe

Gives new meaning to the phrase, “Nothing really matters.”

Promises by politicians surely counts as nothing - on so many levels.

Steve Pinker's favorite joke goes as follows. The student asks the teacher "Why is there something rather than nothing?" The teacher responds, "Ah, even if there wasn't you still wouldn't be satisfied."

I have watched a few of Sabine's videos and they all make me laugh, I like her sense of humour; at 8:34 this one cracked me up. I also agree that something cannot come from nothing and how can we trust scientists who come up with incomprehensible formulas. Thank you, Sabine, for presenting information in an understandable way.

SO MANY IDEAS i love this channel, videos never disappoint

12:56 All I can think of is the anthropic principle: if there were nothing, we wouldn't be here to ask "Why is there something?"

The box needs a big warning: Always think OUTSIDE the box. To think inside the box would ruin it.

you are a great teacher, you make simplify a very complex idea.

There is another level of Nothing missing from the list. Level 0 if you like. It's the absence of something expected to be there. For example a series of opaque jars that normally contain cookies. When asked what is in jar 1, you may answer Ten chocolate chip, Jar 2 contains five biscotti, Jar 3 may contains the crumbs from custard cremes but that can be described as 'Nothing'. In the present box in the video, if it contained bubble wrap and a piece of packing tape it would still be classed as empty or containing nothing because when compared to expectations, it contains nothing.

Even a level 9 box of nothing would soon have a cat jumping into it. Unless it was dead.

I love how she puts down physicists and cosmologists that try to get away with creating a universe out of nothing, but not really NOTHING.

I just found your channel today and holy moly you have good videos! Your English is also easy to listen to since mine is bad.

Recently found this channel and I am in LOVE!

The 10th level of nothing is Sergeant Schultz, "I know nothing, NOTHING."

Like many others, I got to know Sabine with her book “Lost in Math”. Since then, she is a value in my life. This discussion about 9 levels of nothing reminds me of the opening sentence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s masterpiece Tractatus: “The world is everything that is the case”. I am a mortal bookworm with a computer science degree, not a philosopher. Here is my subjective interpretation of the sentence and connection to the discussion. By “the world”, Wittgenstein actually refers to the whole universe. I understand this sentence somewhat as: “Anything that we can say is limited to be about this universe”, in a more open form: “The expressive power of human language is specific and limited to express facts about this universe.” I think anything beyond Level 5 is beyond the expressive power of human language, whose origin is our universe full of things, and designed to talk about things. It does not mean that we cannot construct sentences about these concepts, but it means that the meaning conveyed by these sentences will have to be distorted just as an irregular piece of glass distorts the image behind. Even Level 5 is problematic. Look at the sentence “Sometimes virtual particles can become real” at 5:17. As you would think deeper and deeper on the definitions of “real”, “virtual”, “become”, “can” and “sometimes”, you may notice the distortion introduced by the lens of language. Almost certainly, we cannot construct a sentence about a place where “there are no laws of nature”, and expect it to be free of problems. I personally think a lot of language distortion is similarly the main cause of why we see the sub-atomic quantum world “weird”. In describing the double slit experiment, for instance, we often talk about the “poor” electron trying to “decide” which slit to pass through, and then with not enough time to decide, it goes through both at the same time. Clearly, the language and its constituent metaphors, evolved to express facts about universe at our human scale is introducing distortion. I am grateful to you Sabine for the thought provoking episode, you have a visible impact.

This video is a goldmine. Thanks Sabine!

I remember reading Jean Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness and he states that nothing cannot be, by definition. He describes some of the ideas you put forth.

"I really think people are way too respectful of all the stuff physicist make up and get away with, just because their maths is incomprehenseable" Hut ab für dieses ehrliche Geständnis einer Wissenschaftlerin

A good enough answer for me to the "why is there something rather than nothing" question, is that there's only 1 way for there to be nothing but that are countless ways for there to be something.

Thank you for posting this. I think a deep dive is needed into “nothing”.

I remember taking acid and on the come up remembering a conversation about the wetness of water with my brother in law. This led me to a completely different understanding about what nothing might be or not be.

This is like a Seinfeld episode, it’s a story about nothing. We all know how well that went!

Amazingly in-depth analysis of Seinfeld

This is your best work! Very original

Outstanding video as always. The answer I've liked best posits that the absolute potential must have expressions as it can't be absolute otherwise. This is of course more along the lines of philosophy rather than physics, considers the perspective of consciousness without an object, and reverses the concept of nothing to it's equivalent everything, but I still like it. I also like the tautology of the weak anthropic principle, and like to hope for something along the lines of the strong anthropic principle, but that's just my temperament talking.

She has the greatest sly jokes.

Finally a video about me. I love your time spent on the philosophical aspect of a lot of your topics. Theoretical science without philosophy is like cooking without the intent of eating.

You forgot to remove the concept of nothing from the box. The concept of nothing is still something, after all.

I do not know if you were trying to be funny, but it was funny. Instead of saying this is what happened, you said this is our hypothesis and we do not know. Really good way to explain science.

1:54 "You wanted nothing for your birthday, and certainly, you'll be disappointed if you get air instead." - I'm dead lmao.

I love this video. I tried to imagine nothing once but I couldn't do it. Same with infinity.

This is really important thank you very much!

I never understood anything but now I finally understand nothing, thank you!

"In a nutshell, the universe is 4% visible, 23% undetectable and 73% unimaginable." ~Tim Radford

5:48 - That joke was totally worth it.

This is beautiful 😯. You have yourself another subscriber. GR8 content.

Loved your 3 answer recap. You're hired.

Interesting and funny. That was worth subscribing. Thanks for the videos

As they say, "You'll Own Nothing and Be Happy" - so happiness is Level 10! Gotta remove that too

Seen this way it it so very complicated to give "nothing"! It is a great explanation. In general "nothing" might be described as the absence of something ...

AMAZING!! Thank you.

That was brilliant. My head exploded half way though, but it was nothing. I'd suggest two extra levels of not nothingness. The social levels... Level 10 when asking your partner "what's the matter?" Level 11 When asking your partner "what are you thinking about?" And the Hitchhikers Guide to not nothingness.... 12 What's the meaning of life? (Clue: it's a universal constant)

This is one of the funniest episodes. Already at level 2 I felt this 'nothing' is gonna cost me a lot.

Man, the dry humor here is fantastic. That and the sciencey bit together are just the knees of the bees. 🥰

Over the years, in puzzling about why there is something instead of nothing, I found that by using the term “nothingness” in place of “nothing” that I was better able to clarify my thinking, even though it’s impossible for my mind to actually grasp what genuine nothingness would be like. The list of levels of nothingness I have used is slightly longer than the one in your video and included “No Potentialities”. The question I am always left with is: “How can something - any thing - arise from absolute nothingness?” Eventually, I decided that because physics indicates that no thing can arise from absolute nothingness, the fact that our universe exists now must mean that some thing must have preceded the beginning of our universe…but that led to the “turtles all the way down” conundrum: What did the thing that preceded our universe arise from, and so on and so on? And that infinite regression leads to the question: “How can something (that infinite regression of turtles) exist that never began to exist?”

What my grandmother used to say: "There are many more things that don't exist in the universe than things that exist."

Slavov Zizek has this great joke about a man visiting a cafe: The man gives his order to the waitress: He wants coffee without creme. After a while the waitress comes back and explains: “I’m sorry sir, but it seems we are out of creme. Is coffee without milk okey?”.

"Mom! Where's my birthday gift" "Yeah sure, this time I'll give you *nothing* on your birthday"

No matter how much you remove from the box, your nothing still has boundaries. But if you remove the boundaries, something rushes in to fill the nothing. So it's impossible to have nothing.

Love seeing Lost in Math on my shelf, and your videos in my feed. Your works are valuable, and as a physics student, I find your content inspiring! Keep up the amazing work.

I came into this world with nothing and I still have most of it left.

Fantastic video. It only makes sense to me that the universe is level 9, empty of all but possibility. Where would anything else come from but possibility? And possibility or potential would always exist. Possibility interacts with itself to the point where, in pockets, it becomes conscious and aware of it. As a long time Zen practitioner, I am familiar with this as The Great Void.

I heard someone say once "when has someone ever observed a nothing to know it's possible or how it works?". I'm now not convinced nothing was ever a thing, but I did use to buy into the concept.

"Even the best theory can't explain its own existence" Perfect!

1) Is calculus the way we deal with getting as close to zero (nothing) as possible? 2) If you take away time (which is change) do not you also remove any potentials? 2) a Haiku : if there's nothing - it separates everything - if not, nothing does 3) is there the inverse of nothing (infinity)? 4) Why can we use zero in equations but not infinity (is one a real number and the other not)?

🎼🎵🎶I'm gettin' nothin' for Christmas... from Sabine... cuz I've been nothin' but bad...🎵🎶 😂😂😂 You knocked it out of the park Sabine!! 🤣🤣😂🤣

In these times I get closer and closer to the definition of nothing with each new bank statement...

I’ve been a big fan of closer to truth for years. I’m glad to see She’s interested in his thoughts, ideas, and questions as well. She’s so awesome

At least you made me laugh Sabine! I remember a line from Ionesco's Macbett which went roughly "its not nothing, its something". The nothing you discuss is not nothing itself, it is a thought held by something which holds concepts e.g. mind, consciousness, a biological brain. The concept is not the thing itself, it is a model of a thing, defined by conceiving of the absence of the somethings by which the mind accounts for sensation. So the nine levels of nothing reflect nine levels in the way we explain something and thus show us something about the way we think.

Great sense of humor. Sounds like perfectly done for me.

I love this lady. Esp her sly little jokes given straight faced.

I started thinking about nothing over 60 years ago, I'm happy to know it is something. Thank you Sabine for taking the time to go somewhere out of the box with your your take on this invisible, place holding subject...

My housemate once answered, when I asked him to imagine nothing, that nothing is chaos. Pure goob that cant be seen cant be felt has no form no shape no nothing. And Ive always liked that explanation. its where creation came from everything is nothing and nothing is everything

Guenter Weber vor 0 Sekunden So loosely based on Monty Python: “I came from nothing, i'm going back to nothing, in the meantime i'm watching videos about nothing - and in the end what have i lost? Nothing!” But i've gained some easter entertainment from this videos...Thank you for that Sabine !

(11:20) *SH: **_The most popular answer at the moment seems to be that nothing is absurd."_* ... That translates to _"everything is not absurd"_ because any attributes or properties assigned to "nothing" becomes paradoxical (including the word "absurd"). *Nonexistence* is inconceivable without the presence of *Existence,* and vice versa. That's why the juxtaposition of *Existence and Nonexistence* is as far back one can regress while still adhering to logic. ... And as we already know, anything that is not logical is _illogical._

On the question of why there's something rather than nothing, I quite like the anthropic principle. If there's nothing, we wouldn't exist to even know that there's nothing.

Much ado about nothing,, loved it. I have nothing to add,, ,, and I wouldn't know what level to add it to if I did, thank you Sabine.

I LOVE this video Sabine. Brilliance, logic, humor, everything that makes for an excellent teaching video and nothing we don't need. 😉

Remaining solemn and serious all through and yet make every word funny is a rare talent ❤️

The box you gave them supposedly containing nothing is something. Even wishing the person a 'Happy birthday' is something. Even not associating with them is still something. Nothing is a portmanteau term made up of 'no' and 'thing' and as a 'thing' can be any 'thing' something has to exist. Well not until the sentient being ceases to live. But that in itself is not nothing because no one can prove that there is (or is not) a soul or a spirit. Good show.

virtual particles occasionally breed actual particles? a case or an oscillating steady state? articles pop in-- taking up space, forcing a red shift? particles expire, and increase the 'empty' volume?

It is the tension between nothing and anti-nothing that makes this all possible.

Very enlightening. Thank you for "nothing". 😁 I am a regular viewer of your channel, and it's getting better and better (just like expanding universe). Thank you.

Thank you for a great video. I have nothing to add.

After I showed this video to my friends, they no longer complained about the gifts I gave them!

This is a a nice video, Sabine, interesting and light- hearted. As a mathematician, there are two other answers: the empty set (and von Neumann's beautiful idea of constructing all of the natural numbers - and thence all of mathematics- out of it using set theory), and zero probability (you can have events which are "impossible" in the sense of having probability zero, and yet can actually happen.) An example is choosing a point at random from the unit interval; the probability of choosing exactly that point beforehand is zero, hence impossible, and yet you did it! (So in this way mathematicians are doing the impossible every day!) A very different type of "nothing" is the nothing of zen Buddhism, which has maybe four aspects: it's actually quite fascinating from an intellectual point of view; it can only be talked about using paradoxical statements to point at what is meant; but it can only be really understood by "practice", which in its simplest-to-explain form comes out of doing zen meditation. The fourth aspect is that this is actually extremely practical as experiencing glimpses of this "nothingness" tends to be very healthy for our emotions, mind and body, essentially bringing one back to the state of "being yourself", acting very appropriately and naturally, without perhaps the usual stress and anger or fear we might often feel. Intellectually, this sort of "nothing" can be summarized by saying "no distinctions". Then "everything" is the same as "nothing" as everything is the same as everything else. This is one of those paradoxical statements I mentioned. This is different from set theory as "everything" would correspond to the Universe, the set of all sets, which by Russell's fascinating paradox is not itself a set. Sorry, that's just an aside! But once you grasp the intellectual idea of "everything is nothing", you can legitimately ask, "So what?". The point here is that understanding something is not the same thing as experiencing it deeply. Experiencing it deeply has itself many levels. (And yet of course doesn't have any levels at all!) But what I mean is that the first time you really feel this, it's pretty mind-blowing. It's an experience which is truly beyond words and is not even really an experience at all as it can't be labelled at all. This is a kind of mini-enlightenment or "opening". But, the next moment or the next day this is worth very little. (That and $3.50 will buy you a cup of espresso!) Really it only serves as a memory to remind you to try to sit down every morning on your black cushion for 20-40 minutes and try to just, well, just sit there, with relaxed breathing and good posture. Once you get kinda good at that, which may take decades (speaking from personal experience) it starts to become easier to get past the gates of annoyance and impatience and even physical or emotional pain and just be there. The consequence of all this is that afterwards, you may find yourself spontaneously doing something you had been putting off or might be kinder to a friend or a random stranger, or might suddenly have an unexpected spring in your step or twinkle in your eye. Or not! But that kind of nothing is, one might say, definitely worth Something! My favorite reference for Set Theory is Halmos' little book, and for zen is the Soto zen of Dogen, as explained by Suzuki Roshi in his lectures which can be found at cuke.com. Since zen can't really be explained directly in a useful way, many people try to point at it by way of a painting (like the famous Japanese or Chinese artworks) or by a poem. (But it can be just as well expressed in anything ...) Dogen was often poetic and said something like this: To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be awakened by all things. When awakened by all things, your body and mind drop away. When your body and mind drop away, No trace of this realization remains, And this no-trace continues forever...