Nothing, naught, nought and zero

Global Brane Comprehension Enabling a Higher Dimensional Big Tent? (Part #5)

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"Nought" and "naught" are occasionally recognized as distinct, with  "nought" being primarily used in a literal arithmetic sense (as the number 0). "Naught" is used in poetical and rhetorical senses, where "nothing" could equally well be substituted (as when an initiative "came to naught"). An older sense of "naught" as meaning "bad" is still preserved in the word "naughty", with "naughty child" as originally meaning a "good for nothing child". Such problematc connotations remain evident in pejorative characterization of a person as a "zero" or a "nobody" -- and the early banning of the use of "0" after it was first introduced to the West.

There is a degree of current relevance to the elusive nature of "nothing" through its various connotations. This is partly indicated by the crises of globalization -- a strategy which could well be criticized by some as having "come to naught" in its present form. At the time of writing the Occupy movement is focusing the concerns of many who perceive the conventional strategies of governance as offering them "nothing" -- after having irresponsibly facilitated processes through which people were deprived of "everything". Faced with the prospect of "nothing", many experience a sense of emptiness in their lives (Implication of Personal Despair in Planetary Despair, 2010). This problematic situation is compounded by forms of official denial which are reminiscent of the banning of psychosocial consideration of "zero" by the West when it was first introduced.

The relevance of "nothing" is also brought into focus through current international threats of "annihilation" of one country or another -- framed by the earlier strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Ironically, presumably indicative of a condition preceding actual annihilation, would seem to be the discussion of threats of "bombing back to the Stone Age" (Nick Cullather, Bomb them Back to the Stone Age: an etymology, History News Network, 5 October 2006; NATO has bombed Libya back to Stone Age, 19 October 2011).

The significance and signification of zero and nothing continue to evoke commentary (Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing: the semiotics of zero, 1993; Charles Seife, Zero: the biography of a dangerous idea, 2000). At the time of writing, a particular focus on "nothing" is provided by a special issue of the New Scientist (Nothing: the intangible idea that rules the cosmos, 19-23 November 2011), introduced by theoretical physicist Brian Greene (Nothingness: Why nothing matters). For Greene:

Shakespeare had it right, even in ways he couldn't have imagined. For centuries, scientists have indeed been making much ado about nothing -- and with good reason. Nothing, or rather what we've long taken to be nothing, may be the key to understanding everything from why particles have mass to the expansion of the universe... nothing is a rich and subtle subject whose biography is far from finished.... Since the time of Newton, we have thus gradually realised that nature has masked the identity of nothing with a Shakespearian deftness. With the relentless rise of science, we have slowly peeled back the obscuring layers, revealing vital intangibles at the very heart of reality, a grand triumph for nothing. [emphasis added]

Appropriate to this argument, Greene is author of The Hidden Reality: parallel universes and the deep laws of the cosmos (2011).

Physics offers a new sense to "annihilation" in recognizing it as the process that occurs when a subatomic particle collides with its respective antiparticle. Given the requirement that energy and momentum be conserved, the particles are not actually made into "nothing", but rather into new particles.

The themes evoked in that special issue are discussed separately (Fundamental integrative role of nothing -- the ultimate remainder? 2011). For Robert Kaplan (The Nothing That Is: a natural history of zero, 2000):

If you look at zero you see nothing: but look through it and you will see the world. For zero brings into focus the great, organic sprawl of mathematics, and mathematics in turn the complex nature of things. (p. 1)

Why should zero, that O without a figure, as Shakespeare called it, play so crucial a role in shaping the gigantic fabric of expressions which is mathematics? Why do most mathematicians give it pride of place in any list of the most important numbers? (p. 2)

Why had it taken so long to signify nothing? Why was the use of zero after that still so hesitant? And why, having surfaced, did it submerge again? The reasons reach down to the ways we turn thoughts and words into each other, and the bemusement this can cause, then as now. (p. 14)

Nature abhors a vacuum and so do we. Zero, we've seen, is intricately woven into the workings of our thought, but the temptation time and again has been to look for its original outside of the mind, in physical space: a silent desert amid the clamor of oases. We may be disappointed. (p. 175)

Zero is neither negative nor positive, but the narrowest of no-man's lands between those two kingdoms. (p. 190)

We have come to know zero intimately in its mathematical, physical and psychological embodiments. It remains elusive. (p. 203)

Kaplan concludes by citing Wittgenstein:

For Wittgenstein...language built on logic, could only say what isn't: but that by sighting along it -- looking where it pointed -- we could see what is; and Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. This was the famous conclusion of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus... (p. 215)

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