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)
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”..."
