Alan Lightman Looks Into the Void

/my-own-personal-nothingness-rp

  • My Own Personal Nothingness - Issue 60: Searches
    http://nautil.us/issue/60/searches/my-own-personal-nothingness-rp

    “Nothing will come of nothing.”(William Shakespeare, King Lear) “Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”(Blaise Pascal, Pensées, The Misery of Man Without God) “The… ‘luminiferous ether’ will prove to be superfluous as the view to be developed here will eliminate [the condition of] absolute rest in space.”(Albert Einstein, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies) My most vivid encounter with Nothingness occurred in a remarkable experience I had as a child of 9 years old. It was a Sunday afternoon. I was standing alone in a bedroom of my home in Memphis Tennessee, gazing out the window at the empty street, listening to the faint sound of a train passing a great distance away, and suddenly I felt that I was looking at (...)