If you end up knowing something you didn't know before, how is that not teaching something? What kind of articles are you talking about? Are you even talking about articles that are printed in National Geographic and the ones put out by Nature that are summaries of scientific papers?
To be fair, that isn't what Alf meant. He didn't mean nothing as in no matter or energy; He was saying that there is no need to claim existence had a source or cause, that it has always existed in one form or another.