Something about nothing

Just thought I'd share something I read in Discover magazine coverdated June 2007. The article is entitled "20 Things You Didn't Know about NOTHING" written by LeeAundra Temescu (page 88). It may sound too scientific or academic, but it sure is helpful if we want to increase our general knowledge.

Allow me then to just pick (from that article) the first ten which make up some interesting points for conversation:

1. There is vastly more nothing than something. Roughly 74 percent of the universe is "nothing," or what physicists call dark energy; 22 percent is dark matter, particles we cannot see. Only 4 percent is baryonic matter, the stuff we call something.
2. And even something is mostly nothing. Atoms overwhelmingly consist of empty space. Matter's solidity is an illusion caused by the electric fields created by subatomic particles.
   
3. There is more and more nothing every second. In 1998 astronomers measuring the expansion of the universe determined that dark energy is pushing apart the universe at an ever-accelerating speed. The discovery of nothing - and its ability to influence the fate of the cosmos - is considered the most important astronomical finding of the past decade.
4. But even nothing has a weight. The energy in dark matter is equivalent to a tiny mass; there is about one pound of dark energy in a cube of empty space 250,000 miles on each side.
5. In space, no one can hear you scream: Sound, a mechanical wave, cannot travel through a vacuum. Without matter to vibrate through, there is only silence.
6. So what if Kramer falls in a forest? Luckily, electromagnetic waves, including light and radio waves, need no medium to travel through, letting TV stations broadcast endless reruns of Seinfeld, the show about nothing.
7. Light can travel through a vacuum, but there is nothing to refract it. Alas for extraterrestrial romantics, stars do not twinkle in outer space.
8. Black holes are not holes or voids; they are the exact opposite of nothing, being the densest concentration of mass known in the universe.
9. "Zero" was first seen in cuneiform tablets written around 300 B.C. by Babylonians who used it as a placeholder (to distinguish 36 from 306 or 360 for example). The concept of zero in mathematical sense was developed in India in the fifth century.
10. Any number divided by zero is... nothing, not even zero. The equation is mathematically impossible.