The idea of science being discovered relies on one erroneous assumption: our vision of the world, as human beings, is an absolute truth. I want to mention a very interesting scene from the movie "What the bleep do we know?".
In that particular scene, Dr Quantum visits a special place called Flatland. Flatland is a 2D world where the idea of "up" and "down" doesn't exist. You either go forward, backward, left or right. Dr Quantum, being the 3D person that we all are, stands above one of the creatures of Flatland and start talking to her. This creature was afraid because even though she could hear him, she couldn't understand where he was.
That's a really interesting idea. What if there's a dimension us as human beings couldn't grasp. We obviously see the world in 2 dimensions:
- Space (which is by itself a 3D environment)
- Time
If there are other dimensions, then surely our vision of the world comes from our perception and is therefore subjective. Since it is not absolute, it must be invented. And until proven wrong, these theories are generally adopted. When Einstein discovered some strange properties about the time-space environment, he proved wrong Newton's theories, even though they had led the Man's quest to walk on the moon.
The reason I'm telling you this is because something occurred to me today. I've known for a long time that it was al-Khwarizmi who allegedly invented the number 0. But how great this invention really was, that I didn't realize. It hit me today when working on a computer science homework. Programmers start counting from 0. So let's say you have ten items in a table, the first item would be in cell number 0. Why do they do that? I keep getting amazed at how stupid machines really are. And here is yet another example.
Have you ever wondered why a ten is written 10? That is because modern languages use a 10-element alphabet to represent numbers. The alphabet is constitured of ten "figures". They are "0", "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8" and "9". Why just ten? Why not eight or sixteen? It's a safe assumption to believe that Man instinctively stopped at 10, the number of fingers he has on both hands. We do still use our fingers to count, right?Machines are dumb. It will blindly assign the first "figure" to the first "number". Intuitively when counting the first number is one. Think of old roman numbers, they start with I. So this shows to some extent that the number 0 was a pure subjective invention, that was generally adopted as a convention. It was not a natural truth.
We do like to use other alphabets in computer science, like binary (2 figures), octal (8 figures) and hexadecimal (16 figures). There's a big fork of algebra called Boolean algebra focused on binaries. And here's a joke I love:
There is only 10 type of people in the world, those who understand binaries and those who don't.
By inventing the number 0, alKhwarizmi led the way to invent something far greater. Number 0 was more than just a language convention. Indeed it opened the way for something far greater: negatives. If 0 had never been invented, what would it mean to say "negative five"? What's a negative number, if not a number inferior to 0? Science would have looked pretty different without the negative numbers today.
