On the subject of quantifying nothingness, I've always enjoyed the story of the Madgeburg Hemispheres experiments, where Otto von Guericke pumped all of the air out of a metal sphere and then tried to open it to see what "nothing" would look like, only to find that he was unable to open the sphere, even when pulling it in two different directions using horses. Because there is all of the atmospheric pressure of the Earth outside the sphere and only "nothing" inside it, it cannot be opened until some air is allowed back into the sphere to balance the pressure.