Try to imagine nothing.  Clear your mind of all thoughts and feelings.  Have you given up yet?  Trying to imagine nothing is akin to doing nothing.  It is, in itself, something.  “Nothing” is an absolute, like infinity, which also gives rise to futile attempts at understanding.  Interestingly, “nothing” is often overlooked as being a word that bears great depth and meaning.  “Nothing” is usually used with its casual definition, but is also used by physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers with their own respective definitions.

“Nothing” is defined by New Webster’s Expanded Dictionary as “not anything; non-existence”.  It is a rather simple concept to understand at first glance.  Heck, even toddlers can understand what “nothing” is.  If you hold your hands open and tell them that there are no cookies left, they will typically understand immediately.  Every day, people use “nothing” to describe what they did, ate, etc., but could they really have done absolutely nothing?  Of course not.  In the casual sense, “nothing” describes the lack of anything notable or different from the norm.  If I sat at home all day, I could say I did nothing, even though I watched a movie, ate some food, and slept.  “Nothing” is not really nothing.

In the world of physics and physicists, “nothing” is a controversial topic.  One definition of “nothing” is a quantum vacuum, which is void of all physical particles, but is not completely empty.  It still contains electromagnetic waves, which do count as something.  Some physicists, like Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University, take it further and define nothing as no space, time, particles, fields, or laws of nature.  A lack of all of these seems to equal absolutely nothing, right?  The answer is no if you ask philosopher and author Jim Holt.  Holt goes another step beyond Krauss and tacks on a lack of mathematical entities and consciousness to the definition of nothing.  Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium, says, "If laws of physics still apply, the laws of physics are not nothing.” 

Even things that are not of any physical value play a role in the definition of “nothing”.  Think of an emotion.  Can you physically touch or see that emotion?  No, it has no physical value, but it is still something.  Despite the many ideas of how to define nothing, some of the science field is still uncertain about the existence of nothing.
Zero, in mathematical terms, can also be used to describe “nothing”.  If Billy has twenty-five candy bars and he eats all twenty-five of them, what does he have?  Correct, he now has zero candy bars and type-two diabetes.  Zero, however, can only go so far in defining “nothing.”  Zero still holds a place on a number line, so in that sense, it is not truly nothing.

As I previously stated, “nothing” is not really nothing.  “Nothing” is everything that makes something, well, something. The connection between “nothing” and “something” is like the connection between up and down.  Without up, what is down?  In both situations, each factor exists in respect to the other.  Trying to define “nothing” often results in a paradoxical regress.  A regress, in simpler terms, is a problem that, when answered, results in an infinite loop.  For example, the chicken and the egg question.  While trying to define “nothing”, one may often find one’s self coming back to the same question.  “Nothing” is an enigma.  Before replying with “nothing” the next time someone asks you what you did on your day off, try think back to what “nothing” truly is. 

Works Cited
Moskowitz, Clara. "What Is Nothing? Physicists Debate." LiveScience. TechMedia
Network, 22 Mar. 2013. Web. 8 Nov. 2015.
Patterson, R. F. New Webster's Expanded Dictionary. 2005 Ed., Expanded ed. Weston,
Fla.: Paradise, 2004. Print.