HN Books @HNBooksMonth

> For a long time the idea of 0 wasn't natural.

Yes! A long time ago I read a wonderful little book on just this bit of history:

https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Biography-Dangerous-Charles-Seif...

Highly recommend "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" [1] if you're interested in learning more about the number zero.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Biography-Dangerous-Charles-Seif...

⬐ snambi

Seems like fake history...

In thinking about this I wanted to reach for something that fundamentally affected humanity. And then I came up with nothing. Literally. 0.

Quoting from Amazon:

"The Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshiped it, and the Church used it to fend off heretics. Now it threatens the foundations of modern physics. For centuries the power of zero savored of the demonic; once harnessed, it became the most important tool in mathematics. For zero, infinity's twin, is not like other numbers. It is both nothing and everything.

In Zero, Science Journalist Charles Seife follows this innocent-looking number from its birth as an Eastern philosophical concept to its struggle for acceptance in Europe, its rise and transcendence in the West, and its ever-present threat to modern physics. Here are the legendary thinkers—from Pythagoras to Newton to Heisenberg, from the Kabalists to today's astrophysicists—who have tried to understand it and whose clashes shook the foundations of philosophy, science, mathematics, and religion. Zero has pitted East against West and faith against reason, and its intransigence persists in the dark core of a black hole and the brilliant flash of the Big Bang. Today, zero lies at the heart of one of the biggest scientific controversies of all time: the quest for a theory of everything."

Chapter 0 intro from the book:

"Zero hit the USS Yorktown like a torpedo.

On September 21, 1997, while cruising off the coast of Virginia, the billion-dollar missile cruiser shuddered to a halt. Yorktown was dead in the water.

Warships are designed to withstand the strike of a torpedo or the blast of a mine. Though it was armored against weapons, nobody had thought to defend the Yorktown from zero. It was a grave mistake.

The Yorktown's computers had just received new software that was controlling the engines. Unfortunately, nobody had spotted the time bomb lurking in the code, a zero the engineers were supposed to remove while installing software. But for one reason or another, the zero was overlooked, and it stayed hidden in the code. Hidden, that is, until the software called it into memory --and choked."

This is a book about the history and issues surrounding the concept of nothing and it's mathematical representation, the number zero. It isn't a book about computers or programming. It's about zero from ancient times to physics.

Great book. Read it years ago. Going to read it again.

Here's the link:

https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Biography-Dangerous-Charles-Seif...

The number zero was considered useless for a long period of time [1].

A certain piece of academic information isn't useless just because you can't think of a use for it, so I'd say yes, you're wrong.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Zero-The-Biography-Dangerous-Idea/dp/0...

⬐ smegel

> The number zero was considered useless

It still is as far as I can tell. Try adding/subtracting it - it makes no difference. Multiplying it just gets you back the same useless number no matter what. Dividing by zero? Don't even go there!

⬐ bitops

I can't tell if you're trolling or being willfully ignorant?

Zero represents the state of "nothingness" - the universe before anything exists. The blank slate, tabula rasa, etc. The empty page before you write anything it.

Zero is a very deep concept and it is far from useless. See the book "Zero: history of a dangerous number".

⬐ femto

Being funny I think.

I'd think it's actually a valid point though, if the question is put in the form: Does zero (or its reciprocal) have any existence beyond being a useful theoretical construct? Can the physical world actually reach zero, or only asymptotically approach it?

Is the universe infinitely big? Can infinitely small things exist? Can a thing be said not to exist (ie. we have zero of it), or is there always a miniscule probability of it spontaneously appearing due to quantum effects? Is a vacuum really empty? If we have zero, how do we measure it in the face of quantum uncertainty? And so on...

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Edit: grammar

⬐ whatshisface

>Can the physical world actually reach zero, or only asymptotically approach it?

Five minutes ago, I had zero apples in my hand. At this exact moment, I have no way of knowing how many apples are in my hand due to signal delay and processing time.

Numbers as we know them are only useful for describing the past, but at that task they can work perfectly.

⬐ femto

Rather, your brain is telling you that you had zero apples in your hand five minutes ago. Given that any measuring tool (including a brain) is a physical system, isn't it also subject to fundamental uncertainty?

Granted that the probability is negligibly small for uncertainty causing two measuring devices (such as my brain and yours) to return different answers for how many apples were in your hand five minutes ago, but is it truly zero?

Also granted that in practical terms it's not worth arguing over, and I don't propose that such possibilities should be taken into account in everyday life.

⬐ whatshisface

We may have flawed measuring devices, but they are attempting to measure something with a real, constant value. The fact that we are not directly connected to reality doesn't mean that reality is an illusion.

If, in reality, there were zero apples in my hand, I could say that I was holding one apple, but then I would be wrong.

http://www.amazon.com/Zero-The-Biography-Dangerous-Idea/dp/0...