The Numbers 0-9

Zero was the last number humanity invented and the first it needed. The Babylonians had a placeholder symbol for an empty position but never treated it as a number in its own right. The Greeks, who gave the world geometry and the foundations of Western thought, had no zero at all. Aristotle argued against it on philosophical grounds: how can the absence of a thing be a thing? How can nothing be a quantity? The question kept zero out of Western mathematics for a thousand years. The Romans, who built roads and aqueducts across a continent, did their accounting without it.

The Indians gave zero to the world. The mathematician Brahmagupta defined its arithmetic properties in 628 CE. The word the Indian tradition used for it was sunya, meaning void or emptiness. This passed into Arabic as sifr, also meaning empty, which reached Europe through the Arabic mathematicians of the medieval period. In Italian sifr became zefiro, then zero. The English word cipher, meaning a coded message or hidden key, comes from the same root. The word for nothing became the word for the key that unlocks the whole system.

Without zero, place value is impossible. You cannot distinguish 1 from 10 from 100. You cannot write the distance between two points. Every equation that describes the movement of the stars, the behaviour of light, or the structure of the atom contains zero in some form. Zero is not the number of nothing. It is the number without which nothing else means what it means.

Now consider matter. The word comes from the Latin materia, meaning the substance of which things are made. Materia comes from mater: mother. The physical world, everything you can touch and weigh and measure, is named after the mother. The same root gives us material, maternal, and matrix. The womb and the world are etymologically the same thing: the mother substance that receives and gives form to what grows within it. That is why we call it Mother Nature.

Antoine Lavoisier established in 1789 that matter is neither created nor destroyed. It transforms. It moves between states. It passes from one form to another. But the total amount of matter in existence has not changed since the beginning. Nothing has been added. Nothing has been lost. Every atom that exists has always existed in some form. Hermann von Helmholtz established the same for energy: it is not created or destroyed, only transformed. Einstein showed in 1905 that matter and energy are interchangeable expressions of the same thing. E equals mc squared means matter is compressed energy and energy is liberated matter.

Carbon has six protons, six neutrons, and six electrons in its most stable form. Every living thing that has ever existed is built on carbon. The carbon in your body was produced in the core of a star. Not as a metaphor. Literally. Elements heavier than hydrogen are produced by nuclear fusion in stellar cores. The star that made your carbon died and scattered it across space. It condensed into the earth, into the sea, into the first living cells, into every organism that ever lived, and eventually into you. When the body is done the carbon returns. It was never yours alone. You were its temporary form.

Now consider the question: does it matter? The word matter is doing two things simultaneously in English. As a noun it means the physical substance of which everything is composed. As a verb it means to have weight, significance, genuine reality in the world. When something matters it has materia, it participates in the physical fabric of what is real in a way that leaves a trace. When something does not matter it is weightless, without consequence.

The conservation of matter means that nothing you do dissipates without trace. Every action rearranges matter in some form. Every word spoken is a frequency that moves through the air and changes the environment of every space it enters. The trace may be small. It may be undetectable by any instrument currently available. But matter is neither created nor destroyed and neither are the consequences of what you do with it.

The Tao Te Ching observed: the usefulness of the wheel is in the empty hub. Thirty spokes meet at the hub but it is the hole at the centre that makes the wheel useful. The vessel receives what it is given only because it is empty. Emptiness is not the absence of usefulness. It is the precondition of it.

You are beginning this book at ground zero. The expression originally referred to the point directly below a detonation, the origin point of a force that changes everything in its radius. It now means the starting point before anything has been built. That is where you are. You are matter that has always existed. You are carbon forged in a star. You are the vessel arriving empty at the beginning of something. The vessel that arrives empty is the vessel ready to receive. What follows is for you.