“Nothing will come of nothing.”(William Shakespeare, King Lear)

“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”(Blaise Pascal, Pensées, The Misery of Man Without God)

“The… ‘luminiferous ether’ will prove to be superfluous as the view to be developed here will eliminate [the condition of] absolute rest in space.”(Albert Einstein, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies)

My most vivid encounter with Nothingness occurred in a remarkable experience I had as a child of 9 years old. It was a Sunday afternoon. I was standing alone in a bedroom of my home in Memphis Tennessee, gazing out the window at the empty street, listening to the faint sound of a train passing a great distance away, and suddenly I felt that I was looking at myself from outside my body. I was somewhere in the cosmos. For a brief few moments, I had the sensation of seeing my entire life, and indeed the life of the entire planet, as a brief flicker in a vast chasm of time, with an infinite span of time before my existence and an infinite span of time afterward. My fleeting sensation…