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Question of the Month

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

Each answer below receives a book. Apologies to the many entrants not included.

Although Heidegger described this as the fundamental question of metaphysics, the answer is quite straightforward at its base, if we are strictly examining a comparison between something and nothing. There is something because there is literally no such thing as nothing (at all), and there possibly never was. Spinoza and Einstein, among many other great thinkers, subscribed to this view that it is impossible for there to be nothing. Nothing is only ever the absence of something in particular, but it is never truly no-thing, since the very label ‘nothing’ implies ‘something’.

What we think of as empty space in our universe is not actually nothing; it contains energy, radiation and particles that flit in and out of existence.

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