The zero is now a ubiquitous component of our understanding.
The concept is so basic it is routinely mastered by the pre-kindergarten set. Consider the equation 3-3=0. Nothing complicated about that. It is second nature to us that we can represent “nothing” with a symbol. It makes perfect sense now, in 2017, and it's so common that we forget that zero was a relatively late addition to the number scale.
Here's a fact that's amazing to most people: the zero is actually younger than mathematics. Pythagoras’s famous conclusion — that in a right-angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides — was achieved without a zero. As was Euclid’s entire Elements.
How could this be? It seems surreal, given the importance the zero now has to mathematics, computing, language, and life. How could someone figure out the complex geometry of triangles, yet not realize that nothing was also a number?
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What changed in humanity that made us comfortable with confronting the void and giving it a symbol? And is it reasonable to imagine creating the number without understanding what it represented? Given its properties, can we really think that it started as a placeholder? Or did it contain within it, right from the beginning, the notion of defining the void, of giving it space?
In Finding Zero, Amir Aczel offers some insight. Basically, he claims that the people who discovered the zero must have had an appreciation of the emptiness that it represented. They were labeling a concept with which they were already familiar.
He rediscovered the oldest known zero, on a stone tablet dating from 683 CE in what is now Cambodia.
On his quest to find this zero, Aczel realized that it was far more natural for the zero to first appear in the Far East, rather than in Western or Arab cultures, due to the philosophical and religious understandings prevalent in the region.
Western society was, and still is in many ways, a binary culture. Good and evil. Mind and body. You’re either with us or against us. A patriot or a terrorist. Many of us naturally try to fit our world into these binary understandings. If something is “A,” then it cannot be “not A.” The very definition of “A” is that it is not “not A.” Something cannot be both.
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Aczel writes that this duality is not at all reflected in much Eastern thought. He describes the catuskoti, found in early Buddhist logic, that presents four possibilities, instead of two, for any state: that something is, is not, is both, or is neither.
At first, a typical Western mind might rebel against this kind of logic. My father is either bald or not bald. He cannot be both and he cannot be neither, so what is the use of these two other almost nonsensical options?
A closer examination of our language, though, reveals that the expression of the non-binary is understood, and therefore perhaps more relevant than we think. Take, for example, “you’re either with us or against us.” Is it possible to say “I’m both with you and against you”? Yes. It could mean that you are for the principles but against the tactics. Or that you are supportive in contrast to your values. And to say “I’m neither with you nor against you” could mean that you aren’t supportive of the tactic in question, but won’t do anything to stop it. Or that you just don’t care.
Feelings, in particular, are a realm where the binary is often insufficient. Watching my children, I know that it's possible to be both happy and sad, a traditional binary, at the same time. And the zero itself defies binary categorization. It is something and nothing simultaneously.
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Certain properties of the zero likely were understood conceptually before the symbol came about — nothingness was a thing that could be represented. This idea fits with how we treat the zero today; it may represent nothing, but that nothing still has properties. And investigating those properties demonstrates that there is power in the void — it has something to teach us about how our universe operates.
Further contemplation might illuminate that the zero has something to teach us about existence as well. If we accept zero, the symbol, as being discovered as part of our realization about the existence of nothingness, then trying to understand the zero can teach us a lot about moving beyond the binary of alive/not alive to explore other ways of conceptualizing what it means to be.
Resource: farnamstreetblog
