June 02, 2026

Nothing can be created from nothing." — Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

Lucretius wrote this in the first century BCE, during a period of violent civil war in Rome, when the old Republic was collapsing and the world must have felt genuinely unstable. He was a poet and Epicurean philosopher trying to calm his readers by showing them that the universe operates by reliable, knowable rules rather than the whims of gods. His central argument was that all matter transforms rather than disappears — the atoms in your body were once part of something else entirely, and will be again. That chain of dependence is not poetic decoration; it is, for Lucretius, the actual structure of reality.