Tzimtzum ↔ Vacated Space, Vacuum & Inflation

Luria: creation begins with withdrawal — a cleared space, then a thin line of light entering it. Cosmology: a vacuum that is not nothing (zero-point energy, the false vacuum of inflation), from which a universe unfolds along fundamental constants. The rhyme: in both pictures, absence is engineered and generative. Physicist-readers from Bohm-adjacent circles to contemporary Jewish cosmologists (e.g., Howard Smith) have written on the parallel; the tradition's own caveat applies — tzimtzum may be concealment, not literal absence, which is ALSO how physicists talk about the vacuum.