Zero to Infinity in 13.7 billion Years

Somewhere on a farmland, just outside a small city, in Cotabato, Philippines, a leathery brown-skinned farmer just finished off his chore and was entering his small nipa hut shared with his wife and two young boys. Observing the two pubescent lads hunched over something on the table where they usually do their homework, the farmer went closer to see what the two were intently focused on. It was an old car magazine they probably picked up from the trash that rich people discard near the school they go to.

“Look father”, the older boy said, “this red car will run zero to 60 in 3.8 seconds. I converted it for you. It will reach speed of 97 kilometers per hour in just 3.8 seconds. Let me count, one thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand and three, and, before I can say four, the car had traveled 6 kilometers!” The farmer is proud of how his boys have become adept at their school work.

The younger boy chimed in, “And this car costs 50 million pesos!” That is roughly close to US $100,000. It did not escape the farmer’s observation that his youngest son was also good in arithmetic for figuring out the peso equivalent of the car’s cost.

The farmer just smiled, barely understanding what his two sons were telling him, but he had an idea about what they meant. He thought to himself. “Today, I plowed a whole hectare in one day with my four year old carabao that cost my family 30,000 pesos a year ago. That car was 50 million pesos?” Carabao is a Philippine water buffalo. The farmer did not know how profoundly deep his thoughts were.

Comparative numbers, relative representations, such as the title above are meaningless until we add a background behind them to provide context. When the magazine reviewer was glossing over the $100,000 dollar sports car doing 0 to 60 mph in 3.8 seconds, the context he was speaking from was about as far away from the farmer as the distance between Detroit and Cotabato, the economic chasm as wide as a hundred times the Grand Canyon. To compare what the speeding sports car can do in less than four seconds to what the $600 carabao covered in a day, shall we say, “it is neither here nor there”.  There is no relatable context at all.

Zero to Infinity in 13.7 billion years. Let’s begin with the zero.

In the Year 2000 author Charles Seife published a book titled, ZERO, subtitled it, “The Biography of a Dangerous Idea”. He began with Chapter 0, “Null and Void”. Then he started with Chapter 1, “Nothing Doing”.  In Chapter 0, he talked about the USS Yorktown, a billion-dollar missile cruiser that in 1997, just simply “shuddered” to a stop off the coast of Virginia and was dead in the water as abruptly as a light switch turning off a light. The ship received new software to update its computers that controlled the engine. The engineers were instructed to remove a zero from the code when installing the new software. They forgot to do it. That little zero caused the malfunction that stopped the mighty ship on its tracks that supposedly no torpedo or mine can do.

Zero, which means nothing, nada, zilch, in many cultures, was exactly that for millennia both in pre-historic to recorded history. For all that time, zero did not exist, yet people went about their daily lives unhindered by either technical or practical sense. There was no reason to deal with nothing because folks did not buy “nothing” meat or paid anything with “nothing” of value. In some cases zero was even feared, much a part of superstition. The ancient folks began counting one, two and anything over was simply many. They got more sophisticated later to count with their fingers – where usually each had ten of them. But, how about when the numbers exceeded ten? Well, they counted up to nine (9) then used a place holder for the first tenth number. The symbols or shape of the place holder changed over time but they settled on a spherical shape – the zero. The place holder was important. If they were to count beyond ten then they labeled the first place holder as 10 (the first zero, the first 10). Then they started all over again by writing 11, as one after the first ten. After 19, they had to use another place holder, a second one was written as 20, thence followed by 21, then 30-40 after 29, 40-50, and so on and on. Thus the decimal system was born.

Zero went from absolutely nothing, nada, zilch to something largely significant than any of the other digits, when it was not even considered a number per se, at first anyway. It had become so powerful indeed. A zero after 1000 made the number worth ten times more. On the other hand, if zeros are added after a decimal point is a different story.  It   made a number spectacularly minute, miniscule, approaching nothingness, regardless of any digits added past the last one.  .000000034 is tiny and still tiny even if you add numbers after the last digit, i.e. .00000003456789.  However, you add another zero before the last zero to the left of it (but right of the decimal point) and the number becomes exponentially lesser in value.

Now, how about infinity? Like zero, it also means nothing. It has no meaning for much of the things we do ordinarily. Like zero, people got by, transacted and traded without either one a factor, let alone be part of any calculation. Like zero, it has no meaning in our check book.  Well, let me back up. Zero balance means we have in our account nothing, nada, zilch. We cannot issue another check without committing larceny. But we do wish our check book has infinite balance in it. Although that too will not mean much either. You see if you went out to buy an infinitely large yacht for an infinitely large amount of money you’d go home and find that you still had an infinite balance in your account.  That’s great, but it is a fantasy, of course. Why? Infinity, like zero, is not a real number. Tell your accountant, the car dealership, or your bank that you have an infinite balance in your check book. You will immediately be certified because it would be insane to even try to reconcile a checkbook that has an infinite balance.

Back to From Zero to…

Here is the story we’re told, if you remember your last visit to the local Planetarium. The volunteer guide explained. From an infinitely small primordial area somewhere, a very long time ago, approximately 13.7 billion years ago, an infinitely small, dimensionless particle suddenly burst out of existence with an infinite temperature and kinetic energy and brightness that we now come to know as The Big Bang. That was how the universe began. Everything you see today around you – the smallest virus, an atom of oxygen, this earth, its moon, all the planets and all the moons orbiting them, the stars and all the galaxies – were all at once in a compact area so small it was immeasurable. At last count, educated estimates really, there are billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars that populate the observable universe. You ask yourself, “What does that mean?”  Well, it has no meaning really, does it? That primordial dot of an infinitely small area where this all began - has no meaning either, does it? Is that heresy? Does it nullify the Creation? Actually, it supports it. The Big Bang means all of what we see today came from nothing.  There was nothing and the next moment there was something. “Let there be light” was God turning on the switch and here we are.

Did a bar of chocolate shoplifted by a teenager at the local 5 & 10 store on a dare from his friends have a meaning? That chocolate bar in the context of the store’s inventory was a “nothing”, like a zero. The police was called, the boy apprehended, a report was written, a record kept. The nothing chocolate, almost a zero, created a very profound black mark accompanied by an even more infinitely tragic effect on the boy’s life. Zero to infinity in a young boy’s life.

It was no more than a few hours of one night when an up and coming junior executive on a business trip acted on a nothing notion that was to mean nothing at all the following day. He was to go home, return to his wife and beautiful young daughter, the night of indiscretion forgotten, even before the effects of the hungover went completely away. The few hours of a night, in the context of his entire life at that point in time, was .001%. But what happened that night haunted him for the rest of his life. From what then was a tranquil, untroubled life to one of infinite misery for the rest of his married life?

The car that can go from zero to 60 in 3.8 seconds took very little time of a rich man’s life to enjoy.  After all, he had a business to run, private jets to fly, vacations to enjoy - indeed a very busy life to conduct.  The farmer worked his carabao six days a week to plow, to transport anything from sacks of rice to pulling a sled to help a neighbor move. He did these chores from sunrise to sunset for the rest of his farming life. Were his efforts less meaningful when all he would accomplish was feed and take care of his family of four, while the man from halfway around the world was burdened with the welfare of his family, 15,000 employees and several dozen more investors?  

This takes us back to a paragraph, somewhere in the beginning, “it is neither here nor there”, doesn’t it? Well, it’s just like comparing zero to 60 in 3.8 to doing a hectare from dawn till dusk, zero to infinity in 13.7 billion years.