Sunday, August 16, 2015

Nothing...I Don't Mean Vagina!




The Epic of Gilgamesh (18th century BC-), Translated by Andrew George, 1999: 

"Ever the river has risen and brought us the flood,
the mayfly floating on the water.
On the face of the sun its countenance gazes,
then all of a sudden nothing is there!" (X 315) 

 
 Anthony Gottlieb:

"...One might think that science will eventually be able to explain the matter (nothing); certainly many cosmologists have said so. But there is an eternal snag, because any answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing will end up chasing its own tail. Any law of nature or mathematics, any purported set of physical conditions, indeed any fact at all counts as “something”, and is thus itself part of what is supposed to be explained. Every explanation must start somewhere. But there is not, and never could be, anywhere left for this one to start..."


Blaise Pascal, Pensées, The Misery of Man Without God :

“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity

in which he is engulfed.”
 





courtesy: FB page of Dangerous Minds

Anthony Gottlieb: 

"...Shakespeare, too, made much merry play with the word “nothing”, and not only in “Much Ado”. Whether or not something may come of nothing is a recurring theme in “King Lear”, and there is a particularly convoluted verbal joust between Hamlet and Ophelia—some of which escapes contemporary readers unaware that in Elizabethan slang “nothing” can mean “vagina”..."