Saved By Zero

Too many of us take nothing for granted. Or, more accurately, too many of us take “zero” for granted. Have you ever thought about how strange a concept zero is?

The ancient Greeks weren’t even sure if zero should be considered a number. Indeed, they struggled with the question: “how can nothing be something?” Apparently, they never heard of the Twinkie. By 130 AD, however, Ptolemy was using a small circle with a long overbar as a symbol for zero, and he used it as a number. . . the first recorded use of zero as a number.

Before that, the Mayans used zero, as did the Chinese, though it’s not clear if they used it as a mathematical number or just as a placeholder: “TBD.”

During the Medieval period, scholars argued about the religious implications of zero and the vacuum it represented. If nothing falls in the forest, is it sacrilegious?

India is where zero first because a practical number. Around the 9th century, no doubt in response to a customer service call, Indian scholars began using zero to carry out mathematical calculations. This would eventually make its way to Europe where nothing would take root.

So why is nothing important? Well, for starters, from a practical standpoint, without zero, we wouldn’t have modern engineering and science. That means no toasters, no cars, no missiles. Football scores would need to change and fashion models would have to wear an oh-so-fat size one. Very sad.

But more importantly, zero helps us grasp the universe. Without zero, we truly have no concept of nothing. We have a concept of absence, but not of nothing. In other words, we could understand that we have no beatles, but we could not understand that there are no beatles. This makes me wonder how different our world would be if we had no real concept of nothing?

But then, I wonder if we really understand nothing? Can you truly imagine nothing, or do you think of something only with less in it? Maybe zero is all we have; maybe zero represents an abstract thought that we simply can’t conceptualize in any other way?

Maybe we don’t know nothing after all?