Zero - Charles Seife [29]
The very word zero smacks of its Hindu and Arabic roots. When the Arabs adopted Hindu-Arabic numerals, they also adopted zero. The Indian name for zero was sunya, meaning “empty,” which the Arabs turned into sifr. When some Western scholars described the new number to their colleagues, they turned sifr into a Latin-sounding word, yielding zephirus, which is the root of our word zero. Other Western mathematicians didn’t change the word so heavily and called zero cifra, which became cipher. Zero was so important to the new set of numbers that people started calling all numbers ciphers, which gave the French their term chiffre, digit.
However, when al-Khowarizmi was writing about the Hindu system of numbers, the West was still far from adopting zero. Even the Muslim world, with its Eastern traditions, was heavily contaminated by the teachings of Aristotle, thanks to the conquests of Alexander the Great. However, as Indian mathematicians had made quite clear, zero was the embodiment of the void. Thus, if the Muslims were to accept zero, they had to reject Aristotle. That was precisely what they did.
A twelfth-century Jewish scholar, Moses Maimonides, described the Kalam—the beliefs of Islamic theologians—with horror. He noted that instead of accepting Aristotle’s proof of God, the Muslim scholars turned to the atomists, Aristotle’s old rivals, whose doctrine, though out of favor, managed to survive the ravages of time. The atomists, remember, held that matter was composed of individual particles called atoms, and if these particles were able to move about, there had to be a vacuum between them, otherwise the atoms would be bumping into one another, unable to get out of one another’s way.
The Muslims seized upon the atomists’ ideas; after all, now that zero was around, the void was again a respectable idea. Aristotle hated the void; the atomists required it. The Bible told of the creation from the void, while the Greek doctrine rejected the possibility. The Christians, cowed by the power of Greek philosophy, chose Aristotle over their Bible. The Muslims, on the other hand, made the opposite choice.
I Am That I Am: Nothing
Nothingness is being and being nothingness…. Our limited mind can not grasp or fathom this, for it joins infinity.
—AZRAEL OF GERONA
Zero was an emblem of the new teachings, of the rejection of Aristotle and the acceptance of the void and the infinite. As Islam spread, zero diffused throughout the Muslim-controlled world, everywhere conflicting with Aristotle’s doctrine. Islamic scholars battled back and forth, and in the eleventh century a Muslim philosopher, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, declared that clinging to Aristotelian doctrine should be punishable by death. The debate ended shortly thereafter.
It’s no surprise that zero caused such discord. The Muslims, with their Semitic, Eastern background, believed that God created the universe out of the void—a doctrine that could never be accepted where people shared Aristotle’s hatred of the void and of the infinite. As zero spread through the Arab lands, the Muslims embraced it and rejected Aristotle. The Jews were the next in line.
For millennia the center of Jewish life had been planted firmly in the Middle East, but in the tenth century an opportunity for Jews arose in Spain. Caliph Abd al-Rahman III had a Jewish minister who imported a number of intellectuals from Babylonia. Soon a large Jewish community flourished in Islamic Spain.
Early medieval Jews, both in Spain and in Babylon, were wed firmly to Aristotle’s doctrines. Like their Christian counterparts, they refused to believe in the infinite or the void. However, just as Aristotelian philosophy conflicted with Islamic teachings, it conflicted with Jewish theology. This is what drove Maimonides, the twelfth-century rabbi, to write a tome to reconcile the Semitic, Eastern Bible with the Greek, Western philosophy that permeated Europe.
From Aristotle, Maimonides had learned