Right now, there's a key on your keyboard that
ancient philosophers literally believed would
destroy the fabric of reality if they acknowledged
it. Which sounds completely wild, right? It really
does. I mean, you probably use it a dozen times
a day to type out a number or check your bank
balance. But for centuries, humanity actively
pretended it didn't exist. Yeah, they just ignored
it. I am of course talking about the number zero.
The literal concept of nothingness sitting right
there in the middle of our most precise systems.
Exactly. So today we are taking a deep dive into
the surprising history of nothing. We're pulling
entirely from a single comprehensive Wikipedia
article simply titled Zero. Just the digit. Just
the digit. Yeah. And our mission today is to
explore how this one seemingly innocent symbol
broke ancient philosophies, revolutionized global
trade, and became the absolute bedrock of modern
computing. It really is the foundation of everything
digital. Okay, let's unpack this. Where do we
even begin the story of a number that, well,
isn't really there? Well, chronologically, we
kind of have to begin by looking at how ancient
civilizations wrestled with the physical reality
of empty space. Because for a very long time,
humanity functioned perfectly well without a
true mathematical zero. Right, they didn't need
it. Exactly. Instead, early cultures utilized
placeholders. And a placeholder is just, what,
a way to keep a seat warm for a real number so
your columns line up? Pretty much, yeah. In ancient
Egypt, around 1770 BC, papyrus records show scribes
keeping track of the pharaoh's daily incomes
and expenditures. Basic accounting. Right. And
when the amount of goods received perfectly matched
the amount dispersed, meaning a zero balance,
they marked the ledger with a specific hieroglyph
called NFR. A symbol for nothing. Wait, so what
did NFR literally translate to in their language?
It actually meant beautiful or pleasant or good.
Oh, wow. I mean, a perfectly balanced accounting
ledger being literally beautiful makes perfect
sense to anyone who has ever done their taxes.
It's very relatable. And they applied that same
NFR symbol to physical space and construction
too. Like building the pyramids. Exactly. When
drawing plans for tombs and pyramids, NFR indicated
the base ground level. Every other measurement
was calculated as either above or below that
beautiful baseline. That's super practical. It
was. But crucially, this was just a marker. It
wasn't a number they were manipulating in complex
equations. Well, you can't multiply beautiful
by 10. Right. And the Babylonians did something
similar with their base 16 numeral system. How
did that work? Well, by the middle of the second
millennium BC, The Babylonians had a highly sophisticated
numbering system, but to indicate an empty positional
value, like the zero in our number 101, they
initially just left a physical blank space on
the clay tablet. Wait, leaving a literal gap
in a string of numbers? That seems like a recipe
for a massive clerical error. I mean, you wouldn't
know if the scribe meant 11, or 101, or 1001.
Yeah, and the Babylonians eventually realized
the exact same thing. So by around 700 BC, a
scribe named Bell Bonaplew started using three
hooks to mark that empty space. OK, that's better.
Yeah, and that evolved by 300 BC into a punctuation
symbol made of two slanted wedges. You know,
that feels a lot like the space bar on a keyboard.
How so? Well, the space bar is absolutely essential
because it creates the necessary separation between
words so that a sentence actually makes sense.
But you don't consider the empty space itself
to be a letter. It's just the structural absence
of a letter. That's a perfect analogy to the
Babylonians. Those slanted wedges function the
exact same way you wouldn't just write the wedges
by themselves to say you know I have zero apples
because they weren't a standalone value right
because of that limitation we really can't call
it a true concept of the number zero which brings
us to a civilization that could have easily developed
it but actively chose not to the Greeks yes the
Greeks the archaic Greeks had no symbol for zero
and they refused to even use a placeholder digit
why That seems backwards for them. They looked
at the concept of nothing and asked a fundamental
philosophical question. How cannot being be?
Ah, so it was a philosophical block. If a number
represents a quantity of something that exists,
then a number representing nothing implies the
existence of a void. Exactly. And the Greek philosophical
model, going all the way to Aristotle, held that
nature abhors a vacuum. Right. The whole universe
is filled. The whole of the Greek universe rested
on that one pillar. There's no void. So to accept
zero mathematically was to accept the void philosophically,
and that just shattered their entire understanding
of reality. I have to push back on the practical
side of this, though. The Greeks were legendary
astronomers. They were. They were mapping the
cosmos, predicting eclipses, calculating these
complex planetary movements. How could the Greeks
do advanced astronomy without a zero? You can't
calculate the mechanics of the solar system with
just philosophy. You've hit on the exact tension
they face between their philosophy and their
science, and the solution they found was essentially
to cheat. To cheat. Yeah. Greek astronomers,
like Ptolemy around AD 150, realized they couldn't
make their complex base 60 calculations work
without a placeholder. So they caved. Pretty
much. For his work on mathematical astronomy,
Ptolemy swallowed his philosophical pride and
borrowed the placeholder concept from the Babylonians.
He used a symbol that looked like the Greek letter
Omicron. with an overline. Oh, so they did use
a zero when the math demanded it. Yes, but only
during the rough calculations. Ptolemy used it
to figure out the magnitude of solar and lunar
eclipses. But after doing the heavy lifting to
find the answers, the Greeks would stubbornly
convert the final numbers back into standard
Greek numerals. Wait, really? Yeah. They refused
to leave a zero on the published page. That is
wild. They used the forbidden math and the rough
draft, but systematically erased it for the final
copy. They mathematically airbrushed the void
out of existence. That's exactly what they did.
But while the Greeks were actively running from
the void, other cultures, unburdened by that
specific philosophy, were independently embracing
it. Right, because if you're handling the mass
of logistics of building a civilization, eventually
you have to deal with the concept of an empty
space. And our sources show this happening, like,
all over the globe. Absolutely. The need for
a placeholder is so universal that isolated cultures
on completely opposite sides of the world conceptualized
it independently. Like in the Americas. Right.
In the pre -Columbian Americas, the Mesoamerican
long count calendar was under development. This
calendar used a base 20 positional numeral system.
OK, base 20. And to track time accurately across
centuries, they absolutely needed a placeholder
to keep their base 20 columns aligned. And the
Maya and the Olmecs saw this by using various
glyphs right sometimes a partial quatrefoil but
most famously an empty tortoise -like shell shape.
Yes, the shell shape. And they figured this out
incredibly early. There's a stone monument called
Stela II at Chiapas de Corzo that features a
long count date with a zero placeholder corresponding
to the year 36 BC. 36 BC. That's so early. It
really is. And further south, the Inca Empire
engineered a completely different physical system
called the Kipu. Oh, the knotted strings. Exactly.
It was a device made of knotted cords used for
recording accounting and digital data in a base
10 positional system. So how do you knot a string
to show? For the Incas, zero was brilliantly
simple. It was represented by the deliberate
absence of a knot in the appropriate position
on the string. Just an unknotted piece of string
to hold the empty place. That's elegant. Right.
And over in Asia, the Chinese had a similar physical
approach. They did positional decimal calculations
using counting rods on a board. So physical sticks
basically. Right. Moving the physical rods designated
tens, hundreds, and thousands. And if a column
was empty on the board, that empty physical space
denoted zero. But they didn't write it down as
a zero? Not initially. It wasn't until much later
in an AD 1247 mathematical treatise by Qin Juxiao
that we see the introduction of a round symbol
for zero in Chinese texts. Okay, so 1247. Yeah,
but even then it was still primarily treated
as a vacant position rather than a standalone
number you could like add or multiply. Is necessity
always the mother of invention here? I mean,
did the Maya need an empty shell just to make
their complex calendar work, or did the act of
tracking the stars lead them to naturally discover
the concept of zero? What's fascinating here
is that these completely isolated cultures, the
Maya with their calendars, the Incas with their
knotted cords, the Chinese with their counting
rods, they all developed the architecture of
zero to solve highly practical physical problems.
Right, real world issues. Exactly. By creating
a physical representation of an empty space,
they proved that the human mind naturally seeks
a way to quantify the invisible. Giving a shape.
to the shapeless, it's an incredible leap. But
I mean, a placeholder is still just a placeholder.
Yeah. Doing actual mathematical operations with
nothing as a standalone number requires an entirely
different level of abstract thinking. It does.
And that conceptual leap finally happened in
India. And surprisingly, it didn't start with
accounting or astronomy. No. What did it start
with? It started with poetry. Wait, poetry? Yeah.
As early as the third or second century BC, a
Sanskrit scholar named Pingala was studying the
metrics of poetic verse. He used binary sequences
of short and long syllables to identify valid
Sanskrit meters. Oh, kind of like a notation
system. Very similar to modern Morse code, maybe.
That's a great comparison. In this binary system,
Pingala used the Sanskrit word shunya, which
means void or empty, explicitly as a marker to
refer to zero. Wow. And from poetry, it slowly
started to take the physical shape we recognize
today. Right. For example, the Bakhshali manuscript,
which is an ancient manual for merchants, used
a black dot for zero. Just a solid dot. Yeah.
And later, there's an undeniable stone inscription
at the Chaturboj Temple in Gwalior, India, dated
to 8876, clearly showing the digit zero is a
small circle. So the circle is finally there.
Yes. But the true mathematical breakthrough arrived
in the seventh century with an Indian mathematician
named Brahmagupta. What did he do? He was the
first to establish the formal rules for zero.
He stated mathematically that the sum of zero
with itself is zero. He defined how it interacts
with negative and positive numbers. He gave it
rules. Exactly. But when he tried to push the
logic to its absolute limit, he hit a wall. Brahmagupta
tried to define division by zero. Oh boy. I mean,
treating nothing as a standalone number breaks
basic arithmetic pretty quickly. You can't just
divide a physical pi among zero people. Exactly,
and Brahmagupta couldn't quite solve it. He incorrectly
stated that a number divided by zero results
in a fraction with zero as the denominator. Which
doesn't really answer the question. No, it just
shifts the problem. It wasn't until the 12th
century that another Indian mathematician, Bhaskara
II, realized that dividing by zero creates a
paradox. Bhaskara wrote that dividing a number
by zero creates an infinite quantity. Here's
where it gets really interesting. because just
like a physical black hole breaks the laws of
gravity, dividing by zero breaks the laws of
arithmetic. It totally shatters them. Right,
the closer you get to zero in the denominator,
the larger the result gets until the math just
collapses entirely into infinity. And Bosker
recognized that collapse. He actually compared
this infinite quantity to the divine. He wrote
that in this quantity divided by zero, no change
takes place in the infinite and immutable God
when worlds are created or destroyed. Wow. Moving
from a practical tool for keeping columns straight
to a reflection of the infinite nature of God,
that is a profound philosophical shift. It really
is, and that transformative knowledge traveled
quickly to the Islamic world. The Sanskrit concept
of Shinya, the void, was translated into Arabic
as alf. During the Islamic Golden Age, the brilliant
Persian mathematician Al -Khwarizmi synthesized
Greek and Hindu knowledge. In 8813, he used that
little circle, the Afr, to keep the rose in the
Ten's places. Which leads directly to the word
algorithm, right? Yes. Originating from Al -Khwarizmi's
name when his work was later translated into
Latin. That's right. And it's through this Islamic
transmission that the Indian zero finally knocked
on the extremely stubborn doors of Europe. And
Europe did not want to open that door. Not at
all. Because to understand how you and I use
zero today, you have to track how this knowledge
broke through centuries of European traditionalism.
You can actually see the resistance in the etymology,
the journey of the word itself. How so? Well,
the Arabic aphor was translated into medieval
Latin as zephyrum. In Italy, that became zevro
or zephyro, heavily influenced by the existing
Italian word for the west wind. And finally,
that contracted into the word we use today, zero.
I love that. And the individual responsible for
finally getting Europe to adopt it was the great
Italian mathematician Fibonacci. A sequence guy.
The very same. He grew up in North Africa, learned
the Hindu -Arabic numeral system from Arab merchants,
and brought it back to Europe in his 1202 book,
Libra Baci. He explicitly wrote that with the
nine Indian figures and with the sign zero, any
number may be written. I mean, think about this
for a second. Europe's most valuable world changing
import from the East was quite literally nothing.
It's extremely poetic. But even after Fibonacci
laid out a clearly superior system, Europeans
still resisted. I mean, why cling to Roman numerals
for hundreds of years? Try multiplying the Roman
numeral 14th by x7 on paper. It's impossible,
because there's no place value. You can't carry
a 1. It's just an alphabet soup. If we connect
this to the bigger picture, you have to remember
what Roman numerals were actually designed for.
They were a system of recording a final tally,
not a system of calculating. Like a receipt system,
basically. Exactly. If you were a European merchant
in the Middle Ages, you didn't do math on paper.
You did your math physically, manipulating beads
on an abacus. Right, the abacus. And the abacus
was controlled by specialized mathematicians.
Once you figured out the answer on the physical
board, you simply recorded that final tally using
Roman numerals. The adoption of the Hindu -Arabic
system with its true zero completely eliminated
the need for the physical abacus. Because zero
holds the empty place for you on the page. You
don't need a physical bead on a wire to represent
an empty column. The zero does the heavy lifting
right there in the ink. Yes. It fundamentally
democratized mathematics. Manuals called algorithmists
started to spread rapidly. By the 16th century,
math moved from a physical tool gate kept by
specialists to an abstract concept that absolutely
anyone could do using just ink and paper. That
is huge. And once math moves from the physical
abacus to the abstract page, zero is perfectly
positioned to become the invisible bedrock of
the modern scientific age. It forces us to distinguish
between arbitrary human scales and the fundamental
laws of nature. Take physics, for example. Zero
degrees Celsius is an entirely arbitrary human
scale. It's just the freezing point of water.
The atoms are still vibrating. Energy still exists.
Right. But absolute zero, measured in Kelvin,
that is a true physical zero. It's the lowest
possible energy state where a quantum mechanical
physical system hits its ground state and atomic
movement essentially ceases. It is the absolute
limit of physics. And it's also the absolute
foundation of computer science. Oh, absolutely.
Modern computers obviously run on binary. in
the ears representing the presence or absence
of electrical current. But where zero really
causes modern headaches is in programming languages
and something called array indexing. Right. This
is a classic problem. Throughout human history,
when we count a physical list of objects, we
start at one. One, two, three. Early classic
programming languages like Fortran did exactly
that. Makes sense. But in the late 1950s, languages
like LISP and later C introduced zero -based
numbering. If you have an array, a list of items,
the sequence of indices runs from zero up to
n minus one. So what does this all mean for your
daily life? It means massive unseen logic puzzles
for the people building the apps you use. I mean,
why would anyone look at a list of items and
call the very first thing item zero? It goes
completely against human intuition. Well, it
is counterintuitive to a human, but perfectly
logical from the perspective of the machine.
To a computer, zero in an array isn't just a
count, it's an offset. An offset? Yeah. It tells
the computer exactly how far away a piece of
data is from the starting point of memory. The
first item in the list is zero steps away from
the start of the list. Ah. OK. It makes sense
mechanically, but the lack of standardization
causes endless confusion. For example, the programming
language Java uses zero -based indexing. But
Java's database connectivity tool JDBC indexes
from one. It's a nightmare for developers. And
speaking of databases, the concept of null introduces
another layer of complexity that is critically
different from zero. Which is funny, because
in my mind, a null value and a zero are the exact
same thing. Most people think that. But in a
database, if a numeric field is zero, that is
a known specific quantified value. You know for
a fact that you have zero dollars. But if a field
is null, it means the value is completely undetermined.
You don't know if you have zero dollars or a
million dollars or if the bank account even exists
at all. Oh, wow. It leads to what computer scientists
call three -valued logic. A condition isn't just
true or false anymore. It can be true, false,
or undetermined. Any computation that includes
a null value delivers a null result. Exactly.
It's almost like the philosophical void the Greeks
were terrified of has come back to haunt modern
data architecture. It really is the ghost in
the database. And zero even dictates time itself
for a digital infrastructure. The Unix epoch,
which is the foundational moment from which all
subsequent computer time is measured, is set
to a zero time stamp. So the ultimate anchor
of the digital world is midnight. just before
January 1st, 1970. That is computer time zero.
Well, to recap the incredible journey we've been
on today, we started with an Egyptian hieroglyph
for a beautiful baseline. We saw the void become
a philosophical terror that forced Greek astronomers
to erase their own math. We witnessed it transform
into an infinite mathematical revolution in India.
Right, face fierce resistance from abacus -wielding
Europeans, and finally emerge as the offset logic
and binary lifeblood of our modern digital devices.
It truly is the most powerful tool ever born
from human imagination. It is. But I want to
leave you, the listener. with a final provocative
thought from the biology section of our source
material. Oh, this part is fascinating. It really
is. Cognitive scientists and comparative zoologists
have discovered that some animals actually display
an awareness of the concept of zero. They show
the capability for numerical abstraction early
in the evolution of species. Which is just mind
-blowing. Right. If animals innately understand
nothing, if the concept of an empty set is hardwired
into the brains of other species, it raises a
totally mind -bending question for you to ponder.
Did humanity actually invent the concept of zero
with our knotted strings and counting rods? Or
did we simply discover a fundamental law of nature
that the animal kingdom inherently knew all along?
The next time you sit down at a keyboard and
see that oval -shaped key or look at a bank balance
that isn't quite what you want it to be, look
differently at those empty spaces. You aren't
just looking at nothing. You are looking at the
beautiful, terrifying, infinite concept that
built the modern world. Thank you for taking
this deep dive with us. See you next time.