Zero is having a rough year as we stare at the odometer, waiting for the century to roll over. Zero used to be fun, exciting, the edgy ring of the goose eggs the scorekeeper put up as the no-hitter drew toward its conclusion, the minty Life Saver our mathematics sucked on, the giddily thin line where water froze--Celsius only, of course, since Fahrenheit wears its freeze up high like the pulled-up waist of an old man's pants.
Now, though, the once-happy-go-lucky doughnut of a digit, shaped like an "okay" sign, has become a symbol of fear. Y2K has made it a tornado heading for the manufactured housing of our culture, symbolically turning the noble zero into the black hole into which the dying century darkly drains.
As the nineties turn to the noughties in a mist of hype, zero is the digit of the age--the dime on which the turn of the century turns. Do you appreciate how truly important zero really is? Neither the Greeks nor the Romans did. Despite such innovations as poetic catharsis, plane geometry, and really cool siege engines, they never stumbled upon it. That was left to the Mayan and Indian Indians. But ever since we adopted it from the Arabs, keepers of the flame of culture after the sacking of the library at Alexandria, it's been the little ball bearing on which the entire machinery of Western culture has rolled. Without it, you lose "ground zero" and "zero hour." It's given us not only modern math and therefore modern physics (without zero, our rockets would never have completed their countdowns and taken off for the moon), and such details of civilization as the sport-utility vehicle and the Toro lawn mower, but the whole binary thing as well. In his definitive book Number: The Language of Science, which Albert Einstein praised, Tobias Dantzig calls the development of the zero one of the most important events in Western cultural history.
But the West once abhorred the vacuum; only the East truly understood it. Think of the zero as the Eastern counterpoint to the oneness of the West, with its monotheism, its nation-states, and its focus on the individual. It's the main reason 2000 won't be like 1000. The zero is not just the integer of the year, but that of the millennium.
ZERO: A BRIEF HISTORY
12.5 to 15 billion years ago
Nothing, including zero, exists everywhere, making the sum total of the universe. . .zero.
3rd century B.C.
The first known zero appears, as a placeholder in the Babylonian system of counting.
August 28, A.D. 458
Zero, or sunya, appears in a Sanskrit text on cosmology.
The Indian mathematician Mahavira demonstrates that zero has numerical value.
The Indian mathematician Sridhara recognizes the importance of zero; the Arabs adopt it and call it sifr.
European traders latinize the Arab sifr to zephirum, which later becomes our beloved zero.
Anders Celsius develops the centigrade scale, ensuring zero's significance as the freezing point of water.
July 15, 1876
Zeros fill the hit column for the first time in major league history when St. Louis's George Bradley pitches a no-hitter against Hartford.
The "googol" comes to be when mathematician Edward Kasner asks his nephew to think of a name for 1 followed by 100 zeros.
The Japanese Zero fighter plane is first used in combat.
Elvis Costello releases "Less than Zero."
Robert Parish dons the Celtics' double zero for the first time.
Students of the class of '00 matriculate at America's four-year colleges.
January 1, 2000
The millennium is considered zero's big day, except that, thanks to technicalities, mathematicians and historians--instead of partying like it's 1999--will argue over whether the new millennium should go to zero's archenemy, the number one.