Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

by Charles Seife

Nobody knows whether Gog the caveman had used the bone to count the deer he killed, the paintings he drew, or the days he had gone without a bath, but it is pretty clear that early humans were counting something.

The leader of the cult was Pythagoras, an ancient radical. According to most accounts, he was born in the sixth century BC on Samos, a Greek island off the coast of Turkey famed for a temple to Hera and for really good wine.

Ice cubes don’t wipe out civilizations with bursts of gamma rays, though following the then-accepted rules of physics led inexorably to that conclusion. One of the laws of physics had to be wrong. But which one?

According to quantum theory, everything—light, electrons, protons, small dogs—have both wavelike and particle-like properties.

As with the zero-point energy, scientists learned to ignore the infinite mass and charge of the electron. They don’t go all the way to zero distance from the electron when they calculate the electron’s true mass and charge; they stop short of zero at an arbitrary distance. Once a scientist chooses a suitably close distance, all the calculations using the “true” mass and charge agree with one another. This is a process called renormalization. “It is what I would call a dippy process,” wrote physicist Richard Feynman, even though Feynman won his Nobel Prize for perfecting the art of renormalization.

String theory, on the other hand, ties together a number of existing theories in a very pretty way, and makes a number of predictions about the way black holes and particles behave, but none of those predictions are testable or observable. While string theory might be mathematically consistent, and even beautiful, it is not yet science.* For the foreseeable future, banishing zero from the universe with string theory is a philosophical idea rather than a scientific one. String theory might well be correct, but we may never have the means to find out.