Zero: The Strangest Number Ever Invented

Hey guys! We’re now live on Spotify🎧 Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/show/5rqQFYdoSPWZ0QLQp27Rmj?si=nLAoFdo5SoSqJ7QoN3eUQQ The Sundown Archive holds the strangest scientific truths, laid out one at a time, meant to be read in a single long sitting. Get comfortable. Get the book: https://publy.store/t/wbpca93 In 683, a stonecutter in Cambodia carved a date with a small dot between the six and the five, the oldest dated zero ever found in stone. Bankers once banned it, calculators still refuse to divide by it, and physics has never found a true zero anywhere in nature. So if zero isn't nothing, what is it? Tonight we drift from Babylonian clay and a temple garden at Gwalior to a copper ball sixteen horses could not pull apart, atoms colder than anything in nature, and a liquid that never freezes. Get cozy and let this slow walk through the strange history and physics of zero keep you company tonight. Subscribe to Sundown Science if you enjoy taking the long way around the universe. CHAPTERS 0:00 Introduction 1:24 The Dot on the Stone 12:13 A World Without Zero 22:37 The Fear of Nothing 32:49 The Day Nothing Became a Number 43:27 The Forger's Number 53:50 Dividing by Nothing 1:04:25 Putting the Pieces Together 1:12:41 Weighing the Void 1:23:01 The Bottom of Cold 1:33:50 The Jitter That Never Stops 1:45:31 Everything, Perfectly Balanced 1:55:58 So What Is Zero? SOURCES Carbon dating finds Bakhshali manuscript contains oldest recorded origins of the symbol 'zero' (Bodleian Libraries, 2017) — https://www.glam.ox.ac.uk/node/218481 How I Rediscovered the Oldest Zero in History (Amir Aczel, Discover) — https://www.discovermagazine.com/how-i-rediscovered-the-oldest-zero-in-history-26966 The Elusive Origin of Zero (Scientific American) — https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-elusive-origin-of-zero/ What Is the Origin of Zero? (Scientific American) — https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-origin-of-zer/ Brahmagupta biography (MacTutor, University of St Andrews) — https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Brahmagupta/ Chaturbhuj Temple, Gwalior — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaturbhuj_Temple,_Gwalior Mesoamerican Long Count calendar — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_Long_Count_calendar Fibonacci's real mathematical legacy (Nature blogs, 2017) — https://blogs.nature.com/aviewfromthebridge/2017/04/20/fibonaccis-mathematical-legacy/ Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water (1998) — https://route-fifty.com/digital-government/1998/07/software-glitches-leave-navy-smart-ship-dead-in-the-water/290995 Magdeburg hemispheres — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdeburg_hemispheres Kelvin: History (NIST) — https://www.nist.gov/node/1338291 Physicists prove that it's impossible to cool an object to absolute zero (UCL, 2017) — https://phys.org/news/2017-03-physicists-impossible-cool-absolute.amp Coldest temperature ever recorded: 38 picokelvins (Bremen drop tower, 2021) — https://phys.org/news/2021-10-coldest-temperature38-picokelvins.html Experiment and theory in the Casimir effect (arXiv) — https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0609145 — Disclaimer: All videos are produced for entertainment and education. Factual claims are sourced from peer-reviewed research and official scientific institutions. Where a video explores speculation, fringe theories, or the creator's own analysis, it is clearly labeled as such. Sundown Science is not a news outlet. Watch at your own discretion. IMAGE SOURCES Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org #NumberZero #AbsoluteZero