Musings of a Restless Mind

Today, let us pause and remember the fittingly unknown inventor of nothing.

But consider all that nothing means to the universe. You might think if it weren’t for nothing, there could be no something, but it’s the other way around. We are constantly surrounded by things, and counting came naturally to “the paragon of animals”, but how many fingers do you hold up to indicate nothing? That’s a puzzle it took grunting Grog eons to figure out.

The ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, and Chinese excelled at math, but, for thousands of years, there was a hole in math that nobody noticed. Think about it. You may consider yourself a sophisticated person who can amaze your friends by translating the copyright notices on movies into the correct year. You know all about M, D, C, L, X, V, and I, but, tell me, what is the Roman numeral for zero? Oops! Let me give you a clue. There ain’t one, or maybe I should say there ain’t none. Jesus was (according to our calendar) not born in year zero. There’s no such year because there was no such thing to the Roman world. It was, in the words of Fezzik, inconceivable, so Jesus was born in the year one. What was the year before that? It was also the year one. The year after 1 BC is the year 1 AD. To lighten the mood of friends who are going through tough times, I sometimes say, “Count your blessings…. Start with zero.”

It’s true that many ancient cultures did attempt to indicate the lack of something, but it wasn’t until the 7^th century AD that someone in India actually worked out what zero means in a number system and what properties it has, leading ultimately to Star Trek’s Trader Jones’ quip, “Twice nothing is still nothing.” Think about it. There was a time only 1500 years ago when people didn’t know that, or at least couldn’t say it. Apparently this Indian mathematician Brahmagupta who predated Nietzche by centuries stared into the abyss and actually took nothing back.

So, today, let us all celebrate—nothing. Before the invention of zero, it was even impossible to conceive of breaking even. You were either a winner or a loser. How sad must that have been? Nothing is one of the truly great conceptions of mankind. Without nothing, where would all our great scientists like Einstein be? Nowhere.