Ramblings on the Problem of Zero
Just like math, language is a human invention that has allowed for the representation of the world in a form that can be interpreted. Language changes all the time so it can accommodate all things in the world, whether it’s as grand as a new particle or as simple as a mix of emotions. However, zero is incompatible with language.
Language functions similarly to math, and the best examples deal with affirmative and negative statements.
Affirmative: I have five apples: 5 apples
Negative: I have lost five apples: -5 apples
Affirmative: I have zero apples: 0 apples
See the last one? There’s something tricky about how the lack of quantity affects language. See, there’s really only one way to express your ownership of five apples (unless you pull out your thesaurus and change “have,” but that’s irrelevant). Moreover, the statement can only be affirmative (we’re maintaining the “I have” format). In contrast, talking about the lack of apples can be either affirmative or negative.
I other words:
The beauty of language is that it’s fine if something seemingly contradictory is said because language doesn’t solely depend on words for meaning. But if we were looking at it from the point of a logician, who only gets meaning from the word, this seems rather odd. Both statements are saying the same thing, but it’s rather hard to account for one containing a negative and the other one not containing a negative. Luckily, language can accommodate special cases, like zero.
So why is zero so tricky? Well, zero had to be invented because language never accounted for the lack of something in any symbolic way. Unlike most words that gain their meaning from something corresponding to the world, “zero” came from something artificial. What’s crazier than having invented a symbolic representation of nothing is that we treat it as though it were something, which causes massive errors.
It’s easy to give examples of these paradoxes:
The error here is that we divided by zero. Regarding mathematical rules, it’s easy to show how this can be false. But the bigger question is, where does this exist in the universe? There’s nothing in the universe that can cause one to equal zero in any way. Yet, this can happen in math, so there seems to be a disconnect between mathematical language and the universe. Nothing in the universe can cause these sorts of errors in the universe, so there’s something that this implies:
Zero doesn’t exist in the real world.
