When I was a teenager we used to like to sleep outside. Generally it involved spreading a piece of plastic out in the backyard and rolling our sleeping bags out on it. It was a good way to connect with the outdoors and to get away when you couldn't get away. It was an adventure.
An opportunity that sleeping outside provided was time to lay there comfortably and stare at the stars. During one of these adventures my good friend Brian and I wrestled with the question, "What would be here if nothing was here?" In our teenage way we wrestled with the semantic quandary of, "Well if nothing was there then something would be here and that something would be nothing." I don't remember coming up with any conclusions about nothing (though ironically that may be exactly what we did) but we did create this nice model of time. The time when there was nothing we called 'less' and the time when there was something we called 'more'. This, I'm sure, led to all sort of interesting subsequent discussions but eventually we went to sleep.
The nature of nothing remains an interesting question. Entropy might be defined as the cosmic pursuit of nothingness. Maximum entropy, the universe of 'less', would mean no matter, no energy, and since it seems to depend on the existence of matter and energy, no information. This raises questions about the boundary between 'less' and 'more'. Why should the universe of 'more' even exist? What information caused the transition from 'less'? I suspect that this may have to do with wrapping your head around the notion of infinities in which case the answer is "because...".
In any case, 'more' happened and it seems to have happened in a universe that likes 'less' thus entropy is happening. Ironically, without 'more' entropy couldn't exist. If it did then the universe of 'less' would have a property, i.e. information, and wouldn't be 'less'.
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Sadly, I'm out of time for this thread. It does have a purpose. Perhaps I'll get to it later.
