There’s a classic scene in Seinfeld where George and Jerry pitches “a show about nothing” to nonplussed TV executives.
Something very similar might have happened when Amanda Gefter tried to explain to her publisher what would eventually become Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything.
While Seinfeld is only figuratively about nothing, Gefter’s subject is quite literal. Her book revolves around the attempt to grasp the bizarre state that existed prior to the Big Bang—though even the word ‘prior’ is misleading, as time itself hadn’t yet come into existence.
Amanda Gefter wasn’t initially drawn to science, but she caught the bug from her adored father, an amateur cosmologist who spent every spare moment refining his unique idea of how the universe emerged from a specific kind of nothingness.
Because, you see, in science, just as there are different types of infinities, there are also competing theories that attempt to define the nature of nothing.
This wasn’t always the case. For the longest time, nothing failed to capture the attention of the scientific community. Then, in the late 1940s, Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir came along and proved the existence of ‘virtual particles,’ which flicker in and out of ghostly existence even in the most perfect vacuum. The Casimir effect confirmed that the Beatles were right: nothing is real.
Or, as Jerry Seinfeld put it: even nothing is something.
Accepting this axiom, modern cosmology is now in the process of fundamentally reinventing itself. Until recently, the consensus among astronomers was that the universe existed in a constant loop of expansion and contraction—Big Bangs followed endlessly by Big Crunches.
This theory of a “bouncing universe” seemed elegant, but it stopped making sense when we discovered that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating. Most of the world’s leading physicists now agree that this acceleration points to the universe having emerged from nothing.
Gefter’s book was nearly two decades in the making, written during a time when this profound shift in cosmological thinking took place. The author recounts meetings with one scientific luminary after another, all grappling with the strange reality that Life, the Universe, and Everything has emerged from nothing.
To give a flavour, here she is in conversation with theoretical physicist Joseph Polchinski, one of the key contributors to M-theory:
“But M-theory must have some ontology, right?” I asked. “Can you guess what it might be? Are there strings, branes, particles? Some totally new object? Is there space? Time?”
“I can’t even guess,” Polchinski said. “It’s remarkable to know so much about many limits and yet have no good idea of what they are limits of! Holography is clearly part of the answer. The fundamental variables are probably very nonlocal, with local objects emerging dynamically”
Is it possible that there is no ontology at all? I wondered. Is it a theory made of nothing? Then again, if it’s really a theory of everything, wouldn’t it have to be?
As the quote above indicates, parts of the book delve into quite complex scientific concepts (I didn’t know about branes or the holographic principle either). However, by the time the reader reaches those more challenging sections, they will have already been thoroughly seduced by Gefter’s origin story. A series of flashbacks reveals her most unorthodox journey to where she is now.
With an instinctive refusal to bow to any kind of authority—starting with her mother, a maths teacher—Gefter decides early on that she will become a science writer. But she chooses to study neither science nor journalism to get there. Instead, she’ll just plunge in and do it.
And it works. Starting by gate-crashing a physics conference, where she manages to exchange a few words with the ageing John Wheeler, she soon finds herself publishing a brief summary of the encounter in Scientific American. From there, she catches the attention of New Scientist, where, lo and behold, she eventually lands a position as a staff writer.
It’s like a reverse self-fulfilling prophecy: so few people attempt to ‘fake it till they make it’ that those who do find themselves with an open goal. Here’s the author, busy faking it at a physics conference:
As each speaker took to the stage I hunkered down in my seat with my notebook, furiously scrawling, struggling to keep pace while trying to cut through layers of jargon and figure out what the hell everyone was talking about. I couldn’t get enough. In a world in which I didn’t belong and didn’t speak the language, I had never felt more at home.
This punk-rock irreverence toward convention might explain Gefter’s success in gaining access to some of the most sought-after figures in science. I imagine they see themselves in her—they too were once rogues who entered their respective fields guns blazing.
Aside from being the coming-of-age story of a fine science writer, Gefter’s book also tells the story of its own conception. It’s dizzyingly recursive, every bit as wild as that Kaufman film where the movie is about its own making, or M. C. Escher’s famous drawing of two hands, each sketching the other.
The strangeness is compounded by the fact that the very authorship of the book is called into question—or rather, it dynamically shifts throughout the process of its creation. In the early stages, it’s Gefter Sr.’s obsession that drives the project, but his passion gradually transfers to Amanda, who struggles until the very end with the fact that only her name will appear on the cover of what has been a collective effort. He sparked her curiosity about the universe, but she is the one telling this story.
This theme weaves in and out of the entire book, dovetailing with a key shift in perspective that has had an equally profound and perplexing effect in physics: the concept of ‘radical observer dependence.’ The seed of this idea was already present in Heisenberg and Schrödinger’s century-old discoveries, but only now is the broader scientific world ready to face its full implications: that the world consists of the sum of all possible perspectives, each fundamentally irreconcilable.
In the end, we can only sign our own version of the truth, constrained by the limits of our language—much like Flaubert’s description of “human speech as a cracked kettle,” tapping crude rhythms when we long to melt the stars.
Speaking of Flaubert, as I’m nearing the end of Gefter’s book, I come across a reference to something the novelist said in a letter to his lover, the poet Louise Colet:
“Ce que je voudrais faire, c’est un livre sur rien, un livre sans attache extérieure, qui se tiendrait de lui-même par la force interne de son style, comme la terre sans être soutenue se tient en l’air, un livre qui n’aurait presque pas de sujet ou du moins où le sujet serait presque invisible, si cela se peut.” (“What I would like to do is a book about nothing, a book with no external attachment, which would hold itself up by the internal force of its style, like the earth, without being supported, hangs in the air—a book that would have almost no subject, or at least where the subject would be almost invisible, if that is possible.”)
This ambition materialised a few years later when Flaubert published his magnum opus, Madame Bovary. As anyone who has read the novel can attest, it says a great deal about the human condition while staying true to the seemingly impossible aspiration of spinning a story around “nothing.” It’s also a stylistic triumph, making the reader see the world anew.
The same can be said of Gefter’s book. Before reading it, I couldn’t have imagined that such a book could even be written. Afterwards, I feel as though I inhabit a larger universe.