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Well by that logic if you have nothing, there's nothing you can do to it, so you will always have nothing, which reconciles quite nicely with multiplying number
by orobinson 5y ago
Well by that logic if you have nothing, there's nothing you can do to it, so you will always have nothing, which reconciles quite nicely with multiplying numbers by 0 resulting in 0.
- mrkstu 5y agoYep. Q: "How many times has it rained this week?" A: "It has rained zero times" Zero is a perfectly natural state.
- Someone 5y agoI think humans could predict solar eclipses and solve quite a few differential equations before they managed to give that answer. The normal answer to that question was “It hasn’t rained this week” or even “What do you mean? It hasn’t rained this week”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmagupta#Zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmagupta#Zero: ”The Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta is the earliest known text to treat zero as a number in its own right, rather than as simply a placeholder digit in representing another number” That book is from around AD 628 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta)
- spankyspangler 5y agoThese are semantics, the concept of zero is still obviously everywhere in nature. "How many fish have you caught?" "None." Just because you reply none doesn't make it some wildly different concept than if you had replied with the word zero. In fact it's exactly the same thing.