A Space for the Void - Part 2 - The Void is everywhere

In our first post, we explored the ancient concept of Shunya and Akasha: the void as a potent, living space rather than mere absence. In this post, we travel through five domains of human knowledge, each revealing the same surprising truth: the space between things is not nothing. It is where everything happens.

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More than 2,500 years ago, the Chinese philosopher Laozi expressed this insight with characteristic simplicity in the Tao Te Ching (chapter 11) [1]:

"Thirty spokes are joined together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that allows the wheel to function. We mold clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that makes the vessel useful. We fashion wood for a house, but it is the emptiness inside that makes it livable. We work with the substantial, but the emptiness is what we use."

Laozi was not speaking metaphorically. He was pointing at something structural: in every system, the space is not incidental to the function. It is essential for the function. The wheel works because of the hole. The pot holds because of the hollow. Modern science, as we will see, has arrived at exactly the same conclusion, from the subatomic to the psychological.

Mathematics: The Number That Changed Everything

For most of human history, civilisations counted brilliantly but had no way to represent absence. The Babylonians used a placeholder symbol as early as 300 BCE, but it was a notational convenience, not a number [2]. The Romans had no symbol for nothing at all. Their system made even basic multiplication cumbersome, and concepts like calculus were simply unthinkable within it.

The revolution came from India. The mathematician and astronomer Brahmagupta, writing in 628 CE in his text Brahmasphutasiddhanta ("The Opening of the Universe"), was the first to treat zero not merely as a placeholder but as a number with its own properties [3]. He defined zero as the result of subtracting any number from itself, and he laid down rules for adding, subtracting, and multiplying with it. He called it shunya (yes! just like the shunya we discussed in our previous post).

This was not just a notational convenience. It was a conceptual earthquake. With zero embedded in a place-value system, all numbers could be written with just ten symbols. Arithmetic became fast and recordable. The decimal system travelled from India through the Islamic world into Europe, and from it came algebra, calculus, binary code, and the entire architecture of modern computing [4].

Zero, the number that means nothing, made everything possible.

As mathematician Robert Kaplan observed: "From counting to calculating, from estimating the odds to knowing exactly... all of their parts swing on the smallest of pivots: zero" [5].

Physics: The Void That Hums

We tend to imagine matter as solid, dense, and full. In everyday experience, a table is a solid table, a hand can firmly hold objects without passing through them. But physics tells a stranger story.

At the atomic level, matter is mostly space. The nucleus of an atom, which contains almost all of its mass, is unimaginably small relative to the atom as a whole. If an atom were the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would be the size of a pea at the centre of the field  [6]. What surrounds it is not solid stuff but a quantum cloud of electrons, described not as tiny balls in fixed orbits but as probability distributions, smeared across space.

Yet here is where it gets even more interesting. The space between and within atoms is not truly empty either. Quantum field theory tells us that the vacuum, even when stripped of every particle, is alive with constant activity. Fleeting "virtual particles" pop in and out of existence, borrowing energy from the quantum field and vanishing again before they can be directly measured [7].

As a 2025 paper in quantum field theory puts it: "Vacuum is not empty space; it is full of quantum fluctuating electromagnetic fields... even though the average number of photons is zero" [9].

The void, it turns out, is an active place in the universe. The space between things is not absence; it is potential energy, restless and creative, from which matter itself can emerge.

This is Shunya. This is Akasha. And physics, in its own language, has arrived at the same place.

Neuroscience: The Gap Where Thought Is Born

Every thought you have, every sensation you feel, every memory you hold travels through your nervous system as an electrical signal. But at some point, every signal must cross a gap.

The synaptic cleft, the space between one neuron and the next, is only about 20 nanometres wide. Yet crossing it transforms everything. Rather than passing through directly, the electrical signal triggers the release of chemical messengers called neurotransmitters from tiny packages called vesicles. This release is, at its core, probabilistic: each vesicle has only a certain likelihood of releasing its contents, ranging from less than 1% to nearly 100% depending on the synapse [10]. The signal does not simply pass through. It is translated into a question: will the next neuron fire or not?

This is not a flaw in the system. Research shows that this built-in variability actually expands the range of signals the brain can encode, giving neural networks a flexibility and computational richness that a perfectly deterministic system could never achieve [11]. The uncertainty is a feature, not a bug, and what allows this uncertainty is the space in between neurons.

And there is a second space of silence worth noting. After each electrical impulse, a neuron enters a refractory period, a brief mandatory pause during which it cannot fire again. This enforced quiet appears to be essential for organising the timing of neural activity, the rhythms that underpin perception, memory, and consciousness [12]. The brain requires its silences to function.

The space between neurons and the mandatory quiet within their rhythms is not a site of transmission failure. It is the very foundation that allows communication to exist.

Physiology: Sleep as Sacred Pause

If you want evidence that nature values the void, look no further than sleep.

Every animal studied so far, from fruit flies to elephants to whales, requires sleep. No creature that has been observed can sustain its function without it. And during sleep, the brain is not resting. It is doing some of its most important work.

Research has established that memory consolidation depends critically on sleep: hippocampal neurons replay the day's experiences in compressed sequences, and slow brain oscillations, characterised by alternating bursts of activity and periods of neuronal silence, help transfer learning from short-term to long-term memory [13]. The silence during the down-state is not the absence of brain function. It is a different kind of brain function.

What we do not fully process during wakefulness gets processed in the quiet: like emotions and trauma [14]. Connections are strengthened. Unnecessary synapses are pruned. Intra-cellular spaces are cleared by the glymphatic system. The brain, in its stillness, reorganises itself for the next day's engagement.

The lesson from physiology is plain: the pause is not the interruption of life. It is part of how life sustains itself.

Psychology: Creativity Emerges When We Allow Nothing to Happen 

There is one more domain where the gap reveals itself as essential, and it is perhaps the most personal: creativity.

When we stop focusing on a task, a network of brain regions called the Default Mode Network (DMN) becomes active. For a long time this was called the "resting state," as though nothing important was happening. We now know this is wrong. The DMN is involved in self-reflection, future planning, memory integration, and creative thinking [15].

Research has shown that during periods of mind-wandering and mental rest, the brain makes associative connections that focused thinking cannot reach. Stepping away from a problem, the so-called incubation period, allows the brain to continue working on it beneath conscious awareness, arriving at unexpected connections [16]. Direct neural recordings from patients have confirmed that disrupting DMN activity limits creative and divergent responses [17].

The gap between efforts is not wasted time. It is where the new is born.

This is why artists, writers, and scientists often report their best ideas arriving not at the desk but in the shower, on a walk, or just before sleep. The relaxation of focused attention does not switch the brain off. It switches a different part on.

The Pattern Across All Scales

Look at what we have found across five very different domains:

In mathematics, 0 - the number that represents nothing - is what makes all other numbers possible.

In physics, the void between and within particles is not empty but seething with energy and potential.

In neuroscience, the gap between neurons is where the deterministic becomes probabilistic, and where the richness of thought is encoded.

In physiology, the silence of sleep is where the brain renews itself.

In psychology, the pause between efforts is where creativity incubates and insight arrives.

The same pattern appears at every scale of nature. The void is not absence. The void is where transformation happens.

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In our next post, we will return to the body and the practice. How do we actually learn to inhabit the gap? We will explore Kumbhaka, the breath retention of yoga; the transitions between asanas; and the meditation practice of resting between thoughts. The science and the practice, it turns out, point in exactly the same direction.

References

[1] Laozi. (c. 400 BCE). Tao Te Ching, chapter 11. Translation: Mitchell, S. (1988). Harper & Row.

[2] Mathnasium. (2025). Who invented zero? A journey back in time. https://www.mathnasium.com/math-centers/pointloma/news/who-invented-zero-journey-back-time-pl

[3] Eurasian Review. (2025). The mathematical legacy of ancient India: The birth of zero. https://www.eurasiareview.com/04022025-the-mathematical-legacy-of-ancient-india-the-birth-of-zero-oped/

[4] O'Connor, J. J., & Robertson, E. F. (n.d.). Zero. MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews. https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Zero/

[5] Kaplan, R. (1999). The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero. Oxford University Press. As cited in: ScienceOpen. (2022). Brahmagupta and the concept of zero. https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR-.PPDIJRA.v1

[6] Baird, C. S. (2013). Why don't atoms collapse if they are mostly empty space? West Texas A&M University. https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2013/01/12/why-dont-atoms-collapse-if-they-are-mostly-empty-space/

[7] Big Think. (2023). Quantum nothingness might have birthed the universe. https://bigthink.com/13-8/quantum-nothingness-birth-universe/

[8] Science / AAAS. (2015). Physicists observe weird quantum fluctuations of empty space. https://www.science.org/content/article/physicists-observe-weird-quantum-fluctuations-empty-space-maybe

[9] Baydin, A., Zhu, H., Bamba, M., Hazzard, K., & Kono, J. (2025). Quantum vacuum in matter. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02170

[10] Branco, T., & Staras, K. (2009). The probability of neurotransmitter release: variability and feedback control at single synapses. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10, 373–383. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2634

[11] Yang, H., & Xu-Friedman, M. A. (2013). Stochastic properties of neurotransmitter release expand the dynamic range of synapses. Journal of Neuroscience, 33(36), 14406–14416. https://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/36/14406

[12] Weistuch, C., Lendner, J. D., Bhattacharya, S., & Bhattacharya, J. (2021). The refractory period matters: Unifying mechanisms of macroscopic brain waves. Neural Computation, 33(5), 1145–1163. https://direct.mit.edu/neco/article/33/5/1145/97478/

[13] Helfrich, R. F., Lendner, J. D., & Knight, R. T. (2023). Sleep: A brain-state serving systems memory consolidation. Neuron, 111(7). https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(23)00201-5

[14] Poe, G. R. (2017). Sleep is for forgetting. Journal of Neuroscience, 37(3), 464–473. https://www.jneurosci.org/content/37/3/464

[15] Ramsøy, T. Z. (2024). Creativity, mind-wandering, and the default mode network of the brain. https://thomasramsoy.com/index.php/2024/08/26/creativity-mind-wandering-and-the-default-mode-network-of-the-brain/

[16] Seli, P., Risko, E. F., Smilek, D., & Schacter, D. L. (2025). Mind wandering during creative incubation predicts increases in creative performance in a writing task. Scientific Reports. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-09736-y

[17] Shofty, B. et al. (2024). Default mode network electrophysiological dynamics and causal role in creative thinking. Brain. Summarized in: University of Utah Department of Neurosurgery News, January 2025. https://medicine.utah.edu/neurosurgery/news/2025/01/mapping-creativity-role-of-default-mode-network