Nothing: From Absolute Zero To Cosmic Oblivion

Edited by Jeremy Webb

(New Scientist, £7.99)

"Zero is the number you get when you count your oranges and you haven't got any," writes Ian Stewart, one of the contributors to this delightful book.

It's all about the various many-splendoured nothings we don't know we are ignoring on a daily basis, the profound emptiness we've stopped wondering about and the big absences of understanding we don't know we have.

This collection of essays covers a range of subjects grouped around the concept of absence, nothingness and things which we may consider to be nothing but actually have a lot more happening than we might think.

It's a book with a "choose your own adventure" sensibility which allows non-linear exploration of its contents - useful for those who like to binge on a particular subject or readers who want things broken up for variety.

It starts with the beginningest of beginnings, the Big Bang, considers the space between the "stuff" of the universe and its expansion and explores what happened before it - nothing, there wasn't a "before" the Big Bang - and the science behind how we know all this.

Nothing then gives the option of going to an essay that continues to examine cosmology or learning about the brain and in particular what it is doing when it is "idling."

Other subjects are grouped around headings like Beginnings, Mysteries, Making Sense Of It all and Conclusions, which link essays that explore the mind. There's stuff too on black holes, vacuums, boringology, the end of the universe, oblivion and much more.

It's all written in reasonably jaunty style and there's a lot of meat around the skeleton of the subject matter so you're going to be filling a lot of the empty holes in your understanding.

As Socrates said: "The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing," a statement about which this book proves you can be facetiously literal. Nothing wrong with that.

Justin Dowling