Black paint and black holes are not nothing, but they both swallow up everything, including light. | Photo: Cortis & Sonderegger

When we told our editorial team that the feature topic of our next issue of Horizons would be ‘nothing’, many of them immediately quipped that we could do justice to it by leaving the cover page blank. Yup, very funny. As it happens, we did consider the idea seriously. But all kinds of questions quickly arose: Should we depict ‘nothing’ as white or black? White would mean using no printing ink. Conversely, black would represent the absence of light. If the pigments are missing, then the light is there, and vice versa.

All this might seem a bit pedantic. But the longer I think about what ‘nothing’ ought to be, the more dimensions open up to me. I initially didn’t understand what Kafka’s short prose text ‘Wanting to be an Indian’ had to do with nothingness – and ditto in the case of the installation ‘Jung 56’ by the conceptual artist Florence Jung. But the two scholars who explain these works of art opened up new aspects of nothingness to me. And it was during our interview on existential psychotherapy that I realised how people’s fear of boredom, loss and death is also a reflection of their aversion to nothingness.

It seems impossible to imagine nothing, let alone depict it. I take delight in reading about the observations and theories that emerge from the world of physics, according to which a vacuum is not simply a space that is devoid of air. And in the seemingly infinite depths of the universe, dark matter buzzes around that we still haven’t discovered. Even in the most perfect vacuum imaginable, so the theorists tell us, virtual particles must inevitably still be whirring about in it, and it supposedly contains an energy that I have now learnt has led to the biggest mistake in physics.

Pondering the limits of the universe and the place of nothingness within it leads us to a logical dead end. But this is precisely where science is on home ground, because it doesn’t stop at what it knows and what it can do, but goes one level deeper to ask: ‘What if things were different?’. The paradoxes that arise have often led us to brilliant achievements and to unexpected discoveries: from self-awareness to new technologies. Oh, and by the way, we finally decided on black for our cover page: a black hole that opens up a virtual dimension beyond paper, and indeed beyond space itself.