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I went to scientific american and stumbled unto this short but intriguing question: what is the origin of zero? Yeah. Stephen Hawkings has the "brief history of time", so what is the "brief history of zero"? (answer below)
"What is the Origin of Zero?"
http://www.scientificamerican.com/askexpert/math/math12/
Robert Kaplan, author of The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero, provides this answer:
The first evidence we have of zero is from the Sumerian culture in Mesopotamia, some 5,000 years ago. There a slanted double wedge was inserted between cuneiform symbols for numbers, written positionally, to indicate the absence of a number in a place (as we would write 102, the '0' indicating no digit in the tens column).
The symbol changed over time as positional notation, for which zero was crucial, made its way to the Babylonian empire and from there to India, via the Greeks (in whose own culture zero made a late and only occasional appearance; the Romans had no trace of it at all). Arab merchants brought the zero they found in India to the West, and after many adventures and much opposition, the symbol we use took hold and the concept flourished, as zero took on much more than a positional meaning and has played a crucial role in our mathematizing of the world.
The mathematical zero and the philosophical notion of nothingness are related but aren't the same. Nothingness plays a central role very early on in Indian thought (there called "sunya"), and we find speculation in virtually all cosmogonical myths about what must have preceded the world's creation. So in the Bible's book of Genesis (1:2): "And the earth was without form, and void."
But our inability to conceive of such a void is well caught in the book of Job, who cannot reply when God asks of him (Job 38:4): "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding." Our own era's physical theories about the Big Bang cannot quite reach back to an ultimate beginning from nothing-although in mathematics we can generate all numbers from the empty set. Nothingness as the state out of which alone we can freely make our own natures lies at the heart of existentialism, which flourished in the mid-20th century.
Answer posted October 04, 2001
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Now that you got an explanation, may I ask this question:
"What the origin of zero government?"
"State of nature", according to social contract theoreticians Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau.
"Primitive communal" mode of production, according to Karl Marx.
"Invisible hand/perfectly competitive market", according to classical economists like Adam Smith.
"Invisible nature", according to Nonoy Oplas. he he he.
-- Nonoy Oplas
But apparently something came out of nothing. This may seem strange, but is in accord with current physics. The "nothingness" (even between isolated hydrogen atoms in intergalactic space) is actually a seething, foamy soup where some things (photons, electrons, etc.) come into being for very, very short periods of time. This is not a violation of the laws of conservation of mass/energy. There is a loophole in those conservation laws related to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, where for such short periods of time (Planck's constant in the uncertainty formula) some "things" will spontaneously "be" out of "nothing". An analogy --- if you're filching centavos from a multi-billion dollar trans-national, and you make sure to return those centavos very quickly, then the (conservation) accountant won't notice.
A practical example --- you would think that photons generated in the computer monitor travel across space and impact your retinas, thus generating the image you see. Well, not quite. There are "virtual" photons that spontaneously come into existence in the space between the monitor and your eyes. The reason these photons are "virtual" is because they lack the energy to become real. Thus, virtual photons dissappear as quickly as they appear.
But now a "real" photon from the monitor collides with one of these virtual photons (during its momentary, "magical" existence); the impact destroys the original "real" photon, while all its energy (momentum, spin, frequency, etc.) gets transferred to the virtual photon, which now (because of the energy input) becomes a "real" photon and continues the journey to your eyes. Along the way, this newbie photon collides with another virtual photon, etc. You get the photon ... errrr ... picture, so far?
So, am I saying that this foaming bubble bath where "particles" spontaneously come into being out of nothingness, is what there was before the big bang? Ahhh ... NO (don't hit me! promise, 3 paragraphs na lang, and all will be made clear, i hope :) You see, before space and time, there was no space-time within which the "foam" could exist (be).
