AN ARTICLE ABOUT NOTHING AT ALL

STORY: DAVID YOUNG IMAGES: OPEN SOURCE

“OKthen,” the proprietor of this magazine said.

“What nonsense are you going to write about this time?”

“Nothing,” I replied with annoying smugness.

“Sounds like an improvement on last month,” the owner said.

Encouraged by his reply, I am proud to present to an eager public this full and detailed article about Nothing. What is this Nothing? Has there always been Nothing? What is the opposite of Nothing? And what can you do with Nothing? How many jokes can a hackneyed journalist make about Nothing.

But it is an important number, because, you see, Nothing really matters.

Maths, and specifically the sort of arithmetic that many of us learned as infants, occupies a strange place in our world. It’s a field where people proudly proclaim their shortcomings. “I was awful at maths,” they say, as though it’s a badge of honour. In celebrity game shows, when a numbers round is due, our greatest public figures race to display their inadequacy. I mean, one doesn’t want to be the nerd in the room.

Myself, luckily, I managed to combine a dazzling ability with numbers with an unerring insouciant air of cool. Or I thought so at least. Because I knew loads of numbers. 3, 26, and 594 to name just a few. Oh, and 8.

For quite some while, in the world of numbers, there was no Nothing. It didn’t have much of a role in arithmetic. Your average Roman didn’t wake up near a Coliseum or a Forum and wonder to himself “What do you get if you add Nothing to eight?” Egyptian pharaohs didn’t think to themselves “How many cubits higher would the pyramid be if we added no extra bricks?”

Say you were a tailor counting rolls of linen, or a Stone Age man counting his mammoth tusks. You only needed regular old numbers such as 3 or 26. Or, if you were a really powerful Stone Age man, 594. But there was no need for Stone Age man to register that he had no rolls of linen, nor for the tailor to say that he had no mammoth tusks.

So why does Nothing matter? In our notation, 103 and 13 are different numbers. The figure ‘0’ in the former tells us that we have one hundred, and three units, but zero tens. This allows us to do calculations. If you try to add Roman numerals, let’s say CXI and XCI, it’s mind-boggling, even to a nerd like me, unless you translate to 111 and 91. In this context, the zero is said to act as a placeholder. The concept of using a zero to represent nothingness had been established in about 500AD in India, not exactly as a number but more of a philosophical observation. It only reached Europe in the 1200s when the Italian Fibonacci introduced the new-fangled Arabic system.

“What now?” I can hear people saying as they drank mead or did something else Medieval. “Whatever next? What was wrong with DCCXVII? Good traditional number, that.”

But by using a symbol for zero, Fibonacci was able to do sums without an abacus. As party pieces go this didn’t win him many fans, but he was changing the way people made calculations in every walk of life. It meant that people were able to add 111 and 91 without the stress of Xs and Cs. I guess arithmetic became easier after the 13th century. (Not the 103rd century – we haven’t had that yet.)

Not everybody approved. Religious figures saw it as Satanic. Because God, to them, was in everything, then nothingness must be the opposite of God. The Italian government of the time outlawed the number zero and it was only used by merchants in squalid backrooms in coded ways.

“Psst, Signore! Come back here. I’ve got a big fat Nothing!”

Nowadays the figure 0 is essential to everyday lives. Computers operate on a binary system of zeros and ones. All engineering and automation depends on calculations that are impossible without zeros. Without zero, you could never establish the temperature, or speed, or height. Without Nothing, we’d have nothing. See? Simple, really. There’s literally nothing to it