This is a story about nothing.
“What is nothing?” asks the monthly science magazine Newton (June) — a question maybe best answered with silence. But silence itself is something. Everything is something — in which case nothing is nothing. Why not, therefore, banish it from language? Imagine the void, if we did. Communicating without “nothing” would be like calculating without zero.
The ancients did, in fact, calculate without zero. Zero as we know it today, Newton explains, came into being in fourth-century India. The engineering feats and astronomical observations of pre-zero antiquity are the more mystifying given the primitive mathematics behind them. Zero is nothing. Is it? Really? Maybe not. Add (roughly) 80 zeroes to the numeral 1 and you get (roughly) the number of atoms in the observable universe. If zero is nothing, it’s a very potent nothingness.
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