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Comment by dmbaggett | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your sentiment, but this is actually a matter of philosophical debate. Nothing: A Very Short Introduction by Frank Close is an enjoyable treatment.

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But creating light out of quantum vacuum fluctuations and creating it ex nihilo in the theological sense are very different things. The title indicates the latter occurred.

Read the book. You may come away feeling, as I did, that it is rather difficult to assign any semantics at all to the term "nothing".

If "nothing" doesn't mean anything, then the title doesn't mean much either.

Nothing is more important than life. The holes in donuts are nothing. Therefore the holes in donuts are more important than life.

Getting back to the pedantry of the op technically the holes of a donut are at minimum filled with vacuum and on earth with air.

So, are donut holes more important than life or not?! What's the bottom line, man!

It is only difficult, if you expressly go for ambiguity, and confusion. Lest I say spin, which is standard in physics.

'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1127343/

While it is pretty easy to assign semantics to the term "vacuum". I can put vacuum (or a very good approximation) in a bottle. I can pay someone to provide a system which creates a vacuum. I can be killed by vacuum.

Can you put vacuum in a bottle in any more real sense than you can put darkness in a bottle, or cold, or dry?

Phrases found from a Google search for "put vacuum in"

"hand vacuum pump (the one that you can use to bleed brakes with) and hook up the line directly to the actuator and put vacuum in it"

"I was wondering if anyone has experimented with a vacuum pump or any other way to put vacuum in the crankcase."

"I believe VW uses an air pump to test the evap system instead of relying on engine vacuum to put vacuum in the evap system"

"I want to be able to put vacuum in and leave it but not sure why no suction?"

It seems that many people regard it as having a concrete meaning. (I saw little hit of a non-concrete meaning. The other cases I saw were things like "put vacuum in pool", in reference to a vacuum cleaner.)

There were 138 non-duplicate matches for "put darkness in". All were metaphorical, and most were due to a Biblical verse.

While there are some references to "put cold in", as in:

"If you put cold in the thermostat doesn't kick on until much later causing the water to freeze at a later time."

"it's identical to a regular hotwater tank so you have to put cold in to the drain and loop it back"

they are short-hand for "cold water". Otherwise the terms are either metaphorical, like "put cold in its place with this warm parka", or a reminder that chilling devices don't put cold in but rather take heat out.

The phrase "put dry in" only appears in context like "Get 2 [dog] bowls and put dry in 1", or "I didn't have fresh basil so I put dry in the mayo", where the "dry" refers to a preceding noun. (The one exception was the question "why would they want to put dry in their beer?".)

Thus, a haphazard search of the Google corpus reinforces my assertion that putting vacuum in (something) has a more real, concrete sense than putting darkness, cold, or dry in (something).

Yes. Obviously, you just remove the air in the bottle and then there is a vacuum (or as good of an approximation of it as you can obtain using your techniques) inside the bottle.

Personally I would call that 'creating vacuum in a bottle' rather than 'putting vacuum in a bottle.' Putting it into a bottle implies that it was something that existed outside of the bottle and it then transferred into the bottle.

A vacuum can be a robot. A political vacuum occurs after a revolution. A vacuum can be abhorred by nature. My vacuum has a dirty filter. In a vacuum, no one can hear you scream. Vacuum.

... uh, sorry, I got carried away.

"Absolute" vacuum is not attainable due to fluctuations though, not due to some semantic ambiguity.

Then they should have said "vacuum" instead of intentionally using such an ambiguous word.

In music, the intervals of silence are often more important than the sounds themselves.

They are not more important; without the sounds there wouldn't be the intervals of silence.

Without the silence, you wouldn't have a melody.

We can go on discussing about how painting is about adding to a canvas, while sculpting is about taking away the parts you don't need.

Such discussions are pointless.

It is very well possible to have a melody without silence. For instance using glissandi you can move from one note to another without an intervening break.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glissando

That's what I was saying -- neither is more important than the other.

So, it gets no semantics at all, then?

Correct, the semantics are simply nothing at all. :)

However, in the context of discussing this article, they also used the subheader "faster than the speed of light" for a paragraph describing how the physicists accelerated the mirror... and didn't go faster than the speed of light.

So it's kinda a poorly written article in general :)

The sad thing is that for a lot of magazines and newspapers, the person who writes the article isn't the person who writes the headline or headers.

This often means no matter how good the writers understanding is of the subject, the headers always make the article look retarded. It would be like assigning a 12 year old to subheader Stephen Hawkings next book... the sad thing being the 12 year old would likely do a better job than the 40 year old who does this for their living.

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