Nothingness: The Science of Empty Space

What can you say about nothing? Paradoxically, it turns out we know quite a lot about emptiness, and physicist Henning Genz fills us in with Nothingness: The Science of Empty Space, a heady and delightful romp through the cold void of space. From Aristotle's horror vacui to modern quantum-mechanical confirmation that nature does indeed abhor a vacuum, Genz rockets us through the inky blackness with clarity and playfulness. The concept of the absolute void is one of the few that touches both the farthest reaches of philosophy and the most intimate corners of experimental physics, and the push and pull between these two fields has never been more plain. Torricelli's demonstration of the vacuum in Renaissance times turned his world inside out; it took hundreds of years for scientists to conclude that the seeming emptiness actually froths with "virtual particles" and the just barely real Higgs field. The stories are uniformly engrossing and enlightening, and while the science can get a bit abstruse from time to time, the narrative thread runs independently of the hard stuff. If you want the dirt on the most ephemeral of scientific subjects, look to Genz; he's done the impossible and created something out of Nothingness. --Rob Lightner