The late scientist-philosopher Stanley L Jaki once remarked that philosophically speaking, the second most difficult word to grasp is nothing. Every living person has some concept of nothing, though those concepts may vary a little. The idea is certainly a vague one, not easily pinned down; it is certainly difficult to describe in terms of materialism and the rigid formalism of mathematics.

One might be tempted to call the vacuum in deep space "nothing," but this would certainly be wrong. For one, a vacuum isn't nothing, it's a vacuum. More importantly, according to quantum electrodynamics, there exists something in the vacuum, it's just not matter. This is, after all, why there is so much interest in scaling from the current state-of-the-art petawatt class laser systems to the exawatt lasers which offer three order of magnitude more power. If lasers can interact with vacuum, then there is something in the vacuum (in this case, quantum foam).

One might try equating zero with nothing, but this is not exactly accurate. Zero, after all, something, indeed, a very important something. To say that I have zero of something does not mean that I have nothing, for I can have one or two or five or something else. Indeed, zero is the number of symmetry, which generally requires for me to have two (or more) or somethings to attain it: for example, it is the result of integrating an inter cycle of a sine wave. Or colliding an electron with a positron (electron of antimatter), I am left with zero particles of the lepton class, but I am not left with nothing. Thus, zero might provide a good quantitative value for "nothing," though as a qualitative description, it is somewhat lacking. Indeed, as even a quantitative measure of nothing, it is lacking, because there would need to be an infinite number of zeroes, one for each thing whose number must be zero.

This, then, asks a question of the would-be materialists, and specifically of those materialists who make the claims that computers will one day have minds comparable to the human mind. How, exactly, do you program the nothing? How is it that that human mind is able to compute this infinite number of zeroes instantly when "nothing" is mentioned?