Being John Malkovich?

Being and Nothingness is Sartre’s famous existentialist tome. Then there’s Heidegger’s Being and Time, Sein und Zeit. But what's the difference between nothingness and time? For instance, say you were able to go back before the Big Bang, the prequel to "being," over 13.8 billion years ago, when there weren’t even bosons. What if you went back in time and crashed that rusted yellow “dead end” sign, journeying to the universe before matter, would you find degrees of nothingness that were tantamount to time, but not quite the same thing? To use anachronistic Greenwich Mean terminology, does 10 minutes before the Big Bang represent a bigger piece of the void, a greater degree of lessness or emptiness than one solitary minute or second? Imaginary numbers are a branch of mathematics and, by definition, much cosmology and particularly the quantum universe exists in In the Realms of the Unreal to quote the title of the novel by the outsider artist Henry Darger. So while no time machine traversing through wormholes is likely to take a traveler to the “Minor Verse,” before there were Gods inhabiting Mount Olympus, it’s still possible to possess the kind of synthetic a priori knowledge that makes it possible to accurately conclude that the sum of 2=2 is 4.

Read "Something Out of Nothing, Nothing Out of Something" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "I (Who Have Nothing)" by Ben E. King (1963)