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Oxford Skeptics in the Pub events podcast
Thinking and drinking. That is the unlikely goal of our meeting. Each month we invite a speaker to talk about an area of belief and to invite critical debate. We encourage skeptical thought and we enjoy challenging discussions.
Ronald Green, 6 Mar 2013
20-03-2013
Why Nothing Matters
If anything matters, why should nothing matter? And yet it does, for there isn't anything, it seems, that nothing does not touch, or anything that does not touch nothing. History, philosophy, religion, science, art, literature, music – all look towards nothing at some point, stimulating questions that would otherwise not be asked.
What is this nothing, that we can't actually see, touch or feel? Is it absolute? Is it relative to everything else? If we are able to think about it, write and read about it, is it something, and if so wouldn't it then not be nothing?
This is precisely the mystery of nothing – that the more we think about it, the more there is to it.
Disarmingly invisible, the point of nothing – to paraphrase Bertrand Russell on philosophy – is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth examining, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
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