Is Everything Really Just Nothing?

You might be inclined to wonder this with a little abuse of the transitive property.

The transitive property of mathematics states that if A = B and C = B, then it follows that A = C.

Let’s try to apply this to words and see where it leads.

Everything is something. Agree with that? (Really, it’s a whole lot of something’s.)

Let’s take everything to be A and something to be B. Then saying, “Everything is something,” is like saying A = B.

Nothing is something. Agree with this? (It’s just something that isn’t.)

Let’s call nothing C so that saying, “Nothing is something,” is the same as B = C.

If A = B and C = B, then C = A; that’s the transitive property.

Plug in the words: If everything = something and nothing = something, then everything = nothing.

Everything is nothing! What?!

Can you find the fallacy here?

Spoiler alert: The solution will be forthcoming. If you’re not ready to read the answer, don’t look below.

The problem isn’t with saying, “Everything is something,” or, “Nothing is something.”

The problem is that everything and nothing are two different something’s, not the same something.

In algebra, “Everything is something,” is like A = X and, “Nothing is something,” is like C = Y. The first something, X, isn’t the same as the second something, Y.

(Thinking of these “things” as numbers, you might want to write something like A = infinity and C = 0; both infinity and zero are something’s – as I said, that wasn’t the issue. The issue is more like the fact that infinity and zero are two different things.)

Really, in words, we should say, “Everything is something, but nothing is something else.”

Ain’t dat somepin’ else?

Chris McMullen, author of the Improve Your Math Fluency series of workbooks