Zero Is a Pause. Infinity Is Being the Pause:

An essay on nothing, everything and the distance between them

Let's pause to think about zero.

What is it exactly?

Perhaps later. But since we were thinking of pausing, let's first analyze the pause.

A pause indicates one of two things. Work in progress. Or the end of a specific activity for the time being.

When you get started on a project like building your dream house, the pause at the end of the day indicates that it is work in progress. It signals that something much larger, bigger, more significant is going to happen over the coming days. The pauses connect one brick to another, one day to the next, one floor to the next, until you reach the grand finale. The grand finale is signaled by the beginning of a different event: the inauguration, another kind of pause, like a new page in the book of life. It does not signal the end of pauses but is a connecting event, a bridge if you may, that connects letters, lines, paragraphs and pages in this book of life.

Now, onto zero.

To understand zero we need to understand the way we process information. We receive signals via our five sense organs, which are then processed by the brain. Even though we might call these signals analogue, they do have an upper threshold and a lower one. Beyond the thresholds we hold two uniquely mysterious ideas: one of zero and another of infinity.

If we cannot perceive a signal, to us it is zero. If we cannot comprehend the vastness of the signal, it is infinity. Both extremes are united by our cognitive limitations. One is beyond perception. The other is beyond conception.

So zero is a quantity or a signal so small from the perspective of the observer that it can be considered nothing. The observer matters because these two concepts, seemingly at opposite horizons, are based entirely on relative scales.

But what is zero really? Could one of its facets indicate a pause?

To answer this, let me take you through three scenarios, each a different lens, each a different paradigm that helped deepen my understanding.

The first scenario: digital electronics

The first scenario that came to my mind was the role of zero in electronic devices.

Let us look at a digital signal. The pause or "off" is the zero. The "on" is existence, the one. The pause breaks down the signal but also gives it meaning when it rises again. The pause is the reason digital communication works. If there were no off state, a prolonged on state would be like tetanus or lockjaw, a disease where the muscle locks in the final act of signalling, after which there is no release, no pause, no relaxation to continue life. In that instance, the one becomes the end.

But a digital zero state is not a completely off state. There is a flow, a potential within that stillness that keeps the device functioning. The zero state is not a void devoid of anything. It is just a pause that conveys something.

The second scenario: microbiology

From the digital world of zeros and ones, let us move into an analogue world. A world we are so familiar with. Where there are small things, and smaller ones, then microscopic entities that regardless of their microscopic size can have a very big impact on our lives, for better or for worse.

This is the world of microbes viewed through the lens of microbiology.

What separates sterile drinking water from water polluted by animal excrement?

As a microbiologist, I would say that sterile drinking water has almost no microbes, while polluted water has countless. So water that is sterile is pure to us because it contains almost no microbes compared to the unimaginable numbers in polluted water.

Now consider one bacterium in a bottle of water.

Just one? Really?

Wow. That to me is the equivalent of ultra-pure water. I would not hesitate to say that one bacterium in one litre of water is equivalent to zero. That bacterium does not matter to most of us. It is inconsequential. Something we would not even register.

Now let us assume, anthropomorphically, that this tiny bacterium with a lifespan of ten minutes were to try to understand us. Our timeframe. Our lifespan. From its perspective, where ten minutes is a lifetime, we would be infinity. All of us. The trillions of cells that make us. Our time of existence. Even one human year would be infinite for that bacterium.

How is it that an ordinary human could be perceived as infinite by an organism we perceive as zero?

It is all about perspective. To us, a small blip too small to be felt is almost a zero. A femtosecond. One atom. One virus. One bacterium. All of these are almost zero for us. To them, someone as huge as us would be infinity. So a zero from our perspective would, in turn, perceive us as infinite.

Infinite and me.

Am I really?

Yes, I am made up of trillions of individual cells, many microscopic in size and individually a "zero" to us, but united they build me, the infinite.

What then is infinite?

The answer lies in the word itself. It is "In-Finite". Held within the finite, but at a scale that is incomprehensible to the zero. Infinity cannot exist without the concept of zero.

Yes, this is wordplay, but it is also something I believe is an intuitive gut feel that contrasts with and makes infinity infinitely mysterious.

Etymologically, infinity derives from the Latin "in-" (not) and "finis" (limit or boundary), meaning boundlessness.

And aren't we living examples of boundless beings built from microscopic zeros?

And here is the inversion that took me a long time to see:

Zero is a pause we perceive from the outside. We stand outside it. We resume after it.

Infinity is when we realize we are the pause, a negligible blip inside something that outlives us.

If zero is a pause within our lifetime, then on a larger scale, we are the zero. The negligible blip on the timeline we consider infinite.

The third scenario: meditative stillness

Let us now turn our gaze inwards. We might need to use a framework of religion to get in, and the ancient Sanatana Dharma might give us a few more insights to help us understand zero and infinity.

In the Sanatana Dharma, there is a term that describes a state of being: Shunya, loosely translated as "Nothingness". One enters this state during a very deep meditative practice, also called Samadhi. But surprisingly, this state is described not as a state where we perceive nothing. Samadhi means "Equal Mindedness". It is a state where polarities disappear. Not a state of nothingness, but a pause in the functioning of the mind. When the mind stops, the deep state of pure awareness is not about nothing. It is simply that, lacking an appropriate word and a vocabulary to describe the indescribable, we round it up to the closest experience the human mind can conceive of: "Nothing".

In those very deep states of meditation, when the brain waves slow down and one enters a state akin to deep sleep, the awareness is on. The person is aware yet unaware. It is a state that needs to be experienced. That nothingness is not death or dearth of signals; it is a state of transcendence. An experience of "Infinite Zero".

What we can infer

What can we infer from these three different paradigms?

Zero = assumed perception. A useful fictional notion. An idea we treat as given.

This could be the reason why the concept of zero came into use long before humanity arrived at the concept of infinity.

History agrees: zero appears on clay tablets and birch bark manuscripts thousands of years before infinity found a rigorous home in calculus.

We could name the pause long before we could conceive of being the pause.

Zero can be perceived, albeit as "Nothing".

But infinity: it was difficult to understand something much, much, much larger than what we could process.

Therefore we can say that

Infinity = beyond conception. A horizon we can point at but never hold.

Infinity is more complex. It requires one to understand the limits of one's own capabilities, existence, and timeframe. It could not be so easily conceived.

And how is it that zero and infinity are now perceived by many as opposites?

We see sunrise at one horizon and sunset at another. We call them opposites. But the horizon is a mirage, a trick of our vantage point. Zero is not the enemy of infinity. Zero is the pause that allows infinity to be perceived at all.

The weight of empty space is zero to a bacterium. A bacterium is zero to me. To the earth, I am zero. To our solar system, the earth is almost zero. To the Milky Way, the solar system is almost zero. Each is a zero. And each is, from within, a universe of infinite possibilities.

Take empty space. It seems to be nothing, to have nothing, and is conveniently assumed as being "zero". Yet this space between galaxies is ever expanding, pushing them farther apart as the universe accelerates outward, embracing nothingness into itself.

I have been built from this nothing, and so are you.

We are united by being nothing.

And being in-finite.

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