Much ado from nothing

Thinking about the limits of the universe and a place for nothingness leads to logical dead ends. This is precisely the home turf of science: it does not stop at what it knows and can do, but goes one step further and asks: ‘What if it were not so?’ The paradoxes that come to light often lead to peak performances and unexpected discoveries: from self-knowledge to new technologies.

• The impossibility of absence
• Not so empty
• And there’s always something
• The many faces of zero
• “OK, so you’d like to die. Tell me more about it”
• Photo gallery: Swallowed up by black holes