Infinity’s Twin
None of Itself
“The twin of infinity is zero,” said Charles Seife author of Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.
The concept of zero has, throughout history, taken two forms. In one form, zero was a placeholder, “A way to tell 1 from 10 from 100,” said John Matson in Scientific American in 2009.
Its other identity is a sovereign number, a numeral that represented, like all numbers, an autonomous sum.
It’s interesting to me to think of a thing as non-thing. If one equals one of itself and two is two of itself and so on, zero is none of itself. It’s simply the average of -1 and 1.* It’s a thing that, by definition, is not a thing.
Dividing by Zero
There’s a great 4chan meme from back in the day, employed when someone posted in error, or a glitch manifested on the board itself. Community members would react, posting in response that someone or something, “divided by zero.”
That is, someone screwed up so catastrophically, that it corrupted the very existence of the board itself. Dividing by zero is an existential blunder.
Black Holes
Lately, I’ve been a little bit obsessed with black holes. It started with an episode of StarTalk by Neil deGrasse Tyson about two years ago. I find talk of the phenomenon that there are regions in spacetime where the gravitational pull is so strong absolutely nothing can escape, somehow comforting; so much so, that I often will search for podcast conversations about black holes before bed to help me fall asleep. Some people might find the idea that we’re all slowly swirling around a cosmic garbage disposal distressing, but I don’t. In fact, it’s weirdly relaxing knowing that even my deepest anxieties are nothing but noise echoing on the way down the drain.
In zero, there’s peace.
After all, “Black holes ain’t as black as they are painted.”
