Amazon.com Amazon.com's Best of 2001 (ISBN 015100398X, Hardcover)

Most of science journalist K.C. Cole's journey into nothing is about physical nothing. "In the quantum realm, even nothing never sleeps. Nothing is always up to something. Even when there is absolutely nothing going on, and nothing there to do it."

The nothingness of the vacuum is the background to space and time. Cole shows how physicists' ideas about time, space, and reality flow out of their ideas about nothing, whether vacuum or ether. She writes with a half-smile and a glint of humor in her eye, colliding metaphors like particles at Fermilab:

.... Both space and time, individually, are as elastic as bungee cords. It was a further step, still, to see that the fabric of spacetime itself could warp under the influence of matter like hot asphalt under the tires of a heavy truck.... And then, the last straw: Not only could spacetime bend under the influence of matter, it could take matter into its own hands.

Cole's book makes a wry, witty complement to Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe. It's an exploration of string theory (among other things) that will leave your brain only lightly tied up in knots. Or in nots. After all, as Cole writes:

Nothing may be the single most prolific idea ever to plop into the human brain.... Understanding nothing matters, because nothing is the all-important background upon which everything else happens.

--Mary Ellen Curtin