Is Empty Space Nothing?

Is Empty Space Nothing?
By: Doug McManaman

A Vacuum is simply impossible, and only philosophical reasoning can show this, strictly speaking. But even physicists do not regard vacuums as "emptiness". Paul Davies writes: "The physicist regards space as more like an elastic medium than as emptiness....even the purest vacuum is a ferment of activity and is crowded with evanescent structures. To the physicist 'nothing' means 'no space' as well as no matter."[1]

Now this is something Zeno understood centuries ago without the aid of empiriological science. Regarding empty space he argued that if something is happening in it, it is not nothing, but something.[2]

But Smith takes another approach. He argues that whatever is moved is moved by another. Once the initial mover has ceased moving a body, the medium does the rest, facilitating motion.[3] If this is true, no motion could occur in a vacuum since a vacuous medium is not a medium and hence not a mover. Motion would collapse in a vacuum.[4]

Moreover, place is the term of local movement, as Aristotle points out. For local motion is the result of the fact that a body is first in a less natural place and tends towards its natural home, i.e. steam rising out of the kettle, or air seeping out of the tire. But a vacuum would not allow such a hierarchy motion. A vacuum is entirely indifferent. It could not act as a motivating force, that is, attract a thing as an end towards which it would move. Also, a vacuum having no parts, there could be no reason why a thing in a vacuum should rest in one region of it rather than another. Nor would there be any reason why the thing moving through it, like a ray of light, should take one path over another path, this path or that path.[5]

Also, a body at rest in a vacuum would be coterminous with the vacuum, that is, a reality coterminous with a vacuum, something coterminous with nothing simultaneously. But a vacuum is not a place. A place is simply the immediate, immobile surface of a surrounding body. Place is external. It is a fixed frame that a material thing abandons in local motion to seek a station more fitting to its nature.

Granted for a moment then that an entity could occupy a vacuum as its place, and even move to another vacuum or another part of one. Movement from one place to another in the vacuum would produce no changes since the thing moved would in the end be where it was before-in a vacuum.

Notes

¹God and the New Physics (New York: Penguin, 1983), 18.

²Aristotle. Ph., IV 3, 210b22.

³This is true even in light of the law of inertia. "...a mover is needed not merely to initiate a motion or to change the velocity of a moving body. Indeed, a mover is necessary wherever there is motion and for as long as the motion endures. Assume a body moving along a straight line XY and having arrived at some intermediate "point," C. On this supposition, it would be proper to say that the body had completed the XC part of its trajectory but has yet to accomplish the CY portion of its movement. Now having arrived at C, the body is potential to cover the distance CY--indeed just as potential to go through CY as it was potential, prior to the motion, to go through the whole XY. Since the body at C is only potential to cover the distance CY, it needs a mover to move it through the distance in question; it cannot move itself through CY in a primary way ...A body needs a mover not only to start in moving but to keep it moving as long as the motion goes on." V. E. Smith. The General Science of Nature (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1958) 374.

⁴See F. F. Centore, "Aquinas on Inner Space" Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Vol. IV, Number 2, December (1974), 353-54.

⁵See V. E. Smith, Philosophical Physics, 334-39.