More about nothing

This entry is a continuation of an entry I put up some time back on "20 things you didn't know about nothing" by LeeAundra Temescu (Discover, June 2007).

1. It is said that Abdulhamid II, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1900s, had censors expunge references to H2O from chemistry books because he was sure it stood for "Hamid the Second is nothing."
2. Medieval are was mostly flat and two-dimensional until the 15th century, when the Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi conceived the vanishing point, the place where parallel lines converge into nothingness. This allowed for the development of perspective in art.
3. Aristotle once wrote, "Nature abhors a vacuum," and so did he. His complete rejection of vacuums and voids and his subsequent influence on centuries of learning prevented the adoption of the concept of zero in the Western world until around the 13th century, when Italian bankers found it to be extraordinarily useful in financial transactions.
4. Vacuums do not suck things. They create spaces into which the surrounding atmosphere pushes matter.
5. Creatio ex nihilo, the belief that the world was created out of nothing, is one of the most common themes in ancient myths and religions.
6. Current theories suggest that the universe was created out of a state of vacuum energy, that is, nothing.
7. But to a physicist, there is no such thing as nothing. Empty space is instead filled with pairs of particles and antiparticles, called virtual particles, that quickly form and then, in accordance with the law of energy conservation, annihilate each other almost instantaneously.
8. So Aristotle was right all along.
9. These virtual particles popping in and out of existence create energy. In fact, according to quantum mechanics, the energy contained in all the power plants and nuclear weapons in the world doesn't equal the theoretical energy contained in the empty spaces between these words.
10. In other words, nothing could be the key to the theory of everything.
    

Hehehe... how's that for nothing?