The concept of “zero” violates the uncertainty principle, so there is no such thing as pure nothingness. (Instead, the vacuum is a cauldron of virtual matter and antimatter particles constantly springing in and out of existence.)
So the Heisenberg uncertainty principle forces us to reevaluate what we know about reality. One result is that black holes cannot really be black. Quantum theory says that there must be quantum corrections to pure blackness, so black holes are actually gray. (And they emit a faint radiation called Hawking radiation.) Many textbooks say that at the center of a black hole, or at the beginning of time, there is a “singularity,” a point of infinite gravity. But infinite gravity violates the uncertainty principle. (In other words, there is no such thing as a “singularity”; it is simply a word we invent to disguise our ignorance about what occurs when the equations don’t work out. In the quantum theory, there are no singularities because there is a fuzziness that prevents knowing the precise location of the black hole.) Similarly, it is often stated that a pure vacuum is a state of pure nothingness. The concept of “zero” violates the uncertainty principle, so there is no such thing as pure nothingness. (Instead, the vacuum is a cauldron of virtual matter and antimatter particles constantly springing in and out of existence.) And there is no such thing as absolute zero, the temperature at which all motion stops. (Even as we approach it, atoms continue to move slightly, which is called the zero-point energy.)
