What Lies within Zero - Everything is Nothing; Nothing is Everything (Book Review)

Thanks to the mathematics of zero and infinity, Pascal concluded that one should assume that God exists – from Zero : The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

God’s Debris – by Scott Adams is an interesting novella that tries to in a way put out a belief model where the universe and its constituents are explained as “God’s Debris” – the primordial sea of pre-big bang existence that got sprinkled into living existence as we perceive it today. No one knows or can easily surmise as to what exactly happened one second before the big bang took place. In the book “Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea” – author Charles Seife attempts to explain the suffusion of the idea of zero throughout our existence and hints at the possibility of zero being at the beginning as well as at the end of our existence.

If one accepts the universe as a sprinkling of God’s Dust formed out of the primordial sea that existed pre-big bang (which in Charles Seife’s view is nothing but something as close to what Zero signifies), then it can be taken as granted that all forms in perceivable existence today are representations of constituents which when trussed together will be an exact replica of the pre-big bang primordial sea. But as Charles Seife indicates that zero must have existed before and at the beginning of big bang – it leads me to a hypothetical assumption that the sum total of the entire universe must be equal to what Zero signifies – an idea which takes into account the anti-matter argument posed by Stephen Hawkings in “A Brief Historyof Time” – where the positive matter resulted in the observable universe and the negative matter – i.e., anti-matter exists as non-existence, a concept not easily graspable by our faculties.

Any number divided by Zero can result in infinity. As an example, suppose a packet of 50 toffies is to be distributed. If it is to be distributed to 25 people, then the number 50 is to be divided by 25 to result in 2 toffies in the hands of each individual. But if 0 toffies were to be distributed, then one can go on distributing 50 toffies to as many people as possible (of course in this case, no one will get anything in their hands). Thus a number divided by zero tends to infinity. But Zero is also a number – so can it be argued that 0/0 is equal to infinity? An absurd conclusion of course – because it seems that nothing divided by nothing results in everything : an absurd conclusion – but something which is very close to the nature of existence as we understand it today. We know that the universe is expanding and the discovery of that fact by Hubble led one to the conclusion that the universe was once closely packed into a primordial soup – but what could have caused the explosion and whether the universe will infinitely expand or will there be a limit? 

An external source of energy or force acting on the primordial soup? Well it would be naïve to argue that propulsion of the primordial soup into an expanding universe is owed to the agency of an external force – since that is a physical law steeped in our earthly surroundings – and which might not have existed in operation at all during pre-big bang. So does that imply, the initiative must have come from within? If the initiative had come from within, then why at that point of time only – and why it all had to come about in the first place? It could have continued as a dense primordial soup? Let us veer our query towards the expanding nature of the universe which, according to scientists indicates, a pre-historic big bang. The book explained that Zero point energy in the early compact lump had a tendency to push objects apart and this continues to do so which pushes galaxies away from each other, as observed presently. But if Zero point energy had a tendency to push objects apart - why would there be a compact lump in the first place for the big bang to occur? This kind of anomaly results from our very faint understanding of the concept of Zero. I believe Zero is something more than a mere void, and its accounting in our very present understanding has not yet been complete; which explains the anomalies in our midst because we take frames of reference that exist according to our perceptive abilities.

Could Zero be God?  An exact assimilation of the sum-total consciousness in the pre-big bang arrangement but which has got scattered round the universe and now exists as a harmless looking Zero? This concept is not new and thinkers of lore have attempted to discover God in the concept of Zero. In my opinion, offered merely as a thought and not as firm conviction, what Zero signified in the pre-big bang set-up lost its power and energy as it suffused out across the length and breadth of the universe-so much so that it now became worthy of only a concept that exists as a human thought – which leads one to the natural question – whether zero as a concept, not as a numerical entity, but as a thought representing the void – also graspable by animals?

Another interesting thought that can there be is – What value to give to Zero? Should it signify a void – a nothingness? Has Zero been devised to signify a void only because our perceptions of existence imply “not nothingness”.  What if the pre-big bang moment is not the Zeroth hour but just another point among several points as denoted by numbers on a numberline? As a personal belief, it is difficult for me to grasp that there was a big bang – but I do not shy away from believing in the possibility of an inter-dimensional change from a certain dimension to the other. As to whether the Universe is infinite or finite, the riddle lies in the resolution of the concept of Time; but Time as we have been thoroughly ingrained to accept is the Solar notion of time based on earth’s rotation/revolution around the Sun. Time as it really exists devoid of a reference point is a difficult concept for me to conjure.

Image from here