ZERO

The first zero of the story was engraved on the fresh clay by a Babylonian scribe before the 3rd century BCE; today it is at the base of the binary numbering, consisting only of 0 and 1, thanks to which everything is digital, from computers to compact disks.

Known to Greeks and Romans, zero reaches the West in Middle Ages through Arabs, who in turn had learned the notion from Indians in the 5th century CE

The zero was indicated with a small circle, said sunya, meaning empty, nothing. In Arabic Sunya became The, in Latin zephirum, from which zephiro, zero.

Boiled at the beginning as a work of the devil, it soon becomes indispensable to the double games of the merchants and allows, thanks to the notation “positive”, the immense progress of mathematics. With Newton and Leibniz, inventors of infinitesimal calculation, zero assumes the new meaning of “limit value” and conquers a central role not only in mathematical thinking, but in our own vision of the universe.

Before the Big Bang there was nothing, beyond the universe there is nothing; the “absolute zero” (-273,15 °C) is real or is it an abstraction? Is zero “out there” or is it a pure creation of the human mind? Did we find out or invented it? Symbol of nothing, zero became indispensable to conceive what exists.