Paperback review: Nothing, Edited by Jeremy Webb

This book starts with a bang, a very big one 13.82 billion years ago, when an object “roughly the size of a pea” transformed nothing into something.

It concludes around 100 quintillion (don’t ask) years from now when “our observable universe is reduced to a diaspora of dead stars.” Between these brackets, a posse of New Scientist writers explore aspects of nothingness ranging from the vacuum of interplanetary space (“nowhere near as good as that achieved by a laboratory pump”) to the faith-based delay in inventing zero (“a Godless concept”).