Civilizations Banned the Number Zero — Because It Proves Something Terrifying About Reality

Описание: What if the most dangerous idea in history is a number?

In this deep-dive documentary, we trace the strangest journey in the history of science: how nothing became a number, how that number broke every system it touched, and why it still defeats our best theories today. From Babylonian clay tablets to black hole singularities, from a seventh-century Indian astronomer to a bishop who proved calculus made no sense, zero has been discovered, forgotten, banned, and grudgingly accepted across four thousand years and six civilizations.

We begin where you would not expect: with the realization that multiple ancient cultures independently invented a symbol for nothing and then refused to go further. The Babylonians used a placeholder for over a thousand years without ever calling it a number. The Maya carved a shell glyph into stone and built the most sophisticated calendar in the ancient world around it, but never wrote a single rule for calculating with it. Something about zero made every civilization stop at the threshold.

Then, in 628 CE, a thirty-year-old astronomer named Brahmagupta did what no one else had dared. He declared zero a number and wrote rules for adding, subtracting, and multiplying with it. His rules were correct. They still are. But when he tried to divide by zero, something broke that mathematicians have never been able to fix.

We follow zero westward through Baghdad's House of Wisdom, where al-Khwarizmi gave us the words "algorithm" and "algebra." We watch Fibonacci carry it into a Europe that wanted nothing to do with nothing, where authorities banned the symbol and merchants feared it. We dismantle the popular myth that the Catholic Church suppressed zero, using Oxford historian C. Philipp E. Nothaft's research to show what actually happened, and why the truth is more interesting than the legend.

Then we watch zero break calculus. Newton and Leibniz built the most powerful mathematical tool in history on quantities approaching zero, and a bishop named George Berkeley proved their logic was nonsense. It took a hundred and fifty years to fix.

We close at the boundaries of modern physics, where zero marks the places our equations collapse: absolute zero, the unreachable floor of temperature; zero-point energy, the quantum vacuum that is never truly empty; and the singularities at the hearts of black holes and the origin of the universe, where density goes to infinity and volume goes to zero, and the laws of physics simply stop.

Every claim in this video is grounded in specific experiments, specific dates, and the words of the mathematicians and physicists who did the work. Zero is not what you think it is. It never has been.

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