Zero

 Zero is a lovely number. It rhymes with hero. It’s big and round and hopeful. 

There are other names for it too. Nil, zilch, nada, nothing, zip, bottom, nix, cypher, nonentity, nadir, nought, scratch, void, blank and if you are a tennis player or a follower of the Covid figures - love.

Zero is a uniquely human concept. According to mathematicians it’s a magic number and has special properties. 

It is historically interesting. Invented by the Babylonians, who were much better at maths than the Greeks or Romans. They used it as a place holder. For example one hundred and two, written as 12 doesn’t make sense. The Romans had this part of recording numbers sussed. They wrote CII (having a different way of writing one hundred). The Babylonians way of writing 99 didn’t cause any problems but for the Romans writing XXXXXXXXXIIIIIIIII was too clumsy so they made it IC (one less than 100). This made adding CII and IC tricky (who doesn’t prefer column addition?) The Babylonians with their 1//2 and 99 had made life far easier for themselves - it was bound to catch on. 

It was a while, though, before using zero as a single number caught on. The idea of counting nothing is a psychologically complex one that has been a game changer for human life. Without it there would be no computers, mathematically marking the simple ons and offs that make code. 

In nature there is hardly ever nothing, or probably too much of nothing to keep count of. It takes children a while to understand the concept and if you give them two cards with dots on and ask them to pick the one that has the most then most are pretty good at that quite early on, unless one of the cards has no dots. Even by about 7 or 8, about half of the kids, given a choice of two cards, one with a single dot and one with no dot, will get it wrong and even adults take longer to work out the answer than they would if it was a comparison between one and two dots.

Mathematicians like the number zero. When we were looking at universities with my son I lost count of the number of lectures we sat through where they talked about zero. If you add it to a number it doesn’t change the number, if you multiply it with a number the number disappears altogether and if you divide it....hold on, we better not go there, the whole universe could implode. There are mathematical proofs that show that zero is greater than one (although I think someone probably just made a mistake)

Anyway, enough rambling about this number. I was only going to write about it because yesterday the UK, for the first time in this whole shit show of a pandemic, reported zero deaths from Covid-19. The very first time. The only time. We have never reported no deaths before. 

This is huge. 

Or tiny. 

I told you it was a special number. 

I’m suspecting that it doesn’t mean that the whole thing is over, or that there won’t be any more deaths. (There will - 133 people a day still going into hospital and 120 people currently on mechanical ventilation) However, just the hope of a day with no reported deaths is enough for now. 

The realistic pessimists will say that it was a Bank Holiday and so loads of people could have died but there was no one at work to report it. The truly pessimistic will question the idea of only measuring deaths from Covid. “What about all the drunken stabbings?” they’ll say. “What about the huge cancer waiting lists?”

We still have a little while to wait to find out what the government will do next but I’m going to keep hoping for more zero days.