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Zero was born out of the need to give any given sequence of Babylonian digits a unique, permanent meaning.
It is hard to imagine being afraid of a number. Yet zero was inexorably linked with the void—with nothing. There was a primal fear of void and chaos. There was also a fear of zero.
The whole Greek universe rested upon this pillar: there is no void.
the ratio,
the ratio
When Christianity swept through the West, it became closely tied to the Aristotelian view of the universe and the proof of God’s existence. Atomism became associated with atheism. Questioning the Aristotelian doctrine was tantamount to questioning God’s existence.
You’ve got
Killing Archimedes was one of the biggest Roman contributions to mathematics.
Imagine a child born on January 1 in the year 4 BC. In 3 BC he turns one year old. In 2 BC he turns two years old. In 1 BC he turns three years old. In 1 AD he turns four years old. In 2 AD he turns five years old. On January 1 in 2 AD, how many years has it been since he was born? Five years, obviously. But this isn’t what you get if you subtract the years: 2 – (– 4)=6 years old. You get the wrong answer because there is no year zero.
The Aristotelian system was Greek, but the Judeo-Christian story of creation was Semitic—and Semites didn’t have such a fear of the void.
Unlike the Greeks, the Indians did not see squares in square numbers or the areas of rectangles when they multiplied two different values. Instead, they saw the interplay of numerals—numbers stripped of their geometric significance.
This was the birth of what we now know as algebra.
Much to the chagrin of students everywhere.
zero multiplied by anything is zero; it sucks everything into itself. And when you divide with it, all hell breaks loose.
proved that this wasn’t true—by
Pascal argued that it was best to believe in God, because it was a good bet. Literally.
these infinities and zeros are the key to understanding nature.
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.*
might
All that scientists know is the cosmos was spawned from nothing, and will return to the nothing from whence it came.
