Odemus

If there were no matter, would there still be nothing? Is nothing dependant on the existance of something? Are there any studies on the subject or am I being silly?

JGL53

Nothing is not a fact, it's just a theory.

Kat_Somm_Faen

How would you prove nothing or study it?

You would have to send something there

And once you send a probe there it will become something

I dunno but it is a bit of problem to me

And to study something you would have to have photons traveling through it since something you cant see you cant study too...

faust

Remember, you don't have to describe the idea of something directly, you can use comparisons...

"Nothing" is better than sex!

"Nothing" beats ben and jerry's icecream on a hot day, -and- hot cocoa on a cold day.

"Nothing" is very powerful... "Nothing" can prove a creationist wrong! "It" is that good.

"Nothing" is more powerful than God. Tell that to the christians. Just remember, "nothing" is like "unknowable" and "infinity", it can't be captured. Just when you think you know what it is, that ain't it... by definition.

Friar Bellows

You may be interested in reading some of the papers on this web page. It used to be called, "The Physics of Nothing", but the title has changed since then:

http://spot.colorado.edu/~vstenger/nothing.html

eh

This is more of a philosophical question, though it can be confused with physics. The nothingness of the vacuum and void in some pre big bang cosmologies should not be called "nothing" since that causes a conflict with the english language.

From the examples faust gave, you should actually be able to see that "nothing" is mere negation of "everything". Saying nothing is better than sex, does not mean there is something called nothingness that is better than sex, now does it? The proper meaning of the negative is that there are no things that are better than sex. The same applies to other negatives such as "no one, nobody, nowhere, no time, etc. Often those words only have meaning when placed in a sentence as the negation of something else. But there is no actual such thing as nothing, by definition.

But are you really asking if space has existence without matter? If so, it really depends on what you mean by "matter". If you mean all energy and matter, then it seems possible since GR can consistently describe vacuum universes. But if you consider the field of spacetime to be matter as well, then the answer appears to be no. That just means that there is no need for any existence of space independent of the gravitational field, though it would at least be logically possible. So the most we can say is that it's possible for space to exist without something occupying it, but not necessary.