A Little Something about Nothing

The following is modified from commentary prompted after reading Penguin Prose. This is the weekly news letter of the pre-K class at Beauvoir National Cathedral Elementary School, attended by our grandson.

I noticed in the Penguin Prose of February 4, 2008 that the Penguins will “talk about the concept of 0 (zero)." Very interesting!

When we teach counting to kids we go: ‘one,’ ‘two,’ ‘three,’ etc. We never go: ‘zero,’ 1, 2, 3.

It’s amazing that the concept of zero wasn't even introduced into Western mathematics until the Renaissance by the Arabs who probably got it from the Indians where it showed up no earlier than about 600 AD. The Indians called it sunya meaning "empty or "blank", related to the Buddhist concept of sunyata meaning "emptiness" or "void."

It is certainly believable that zero was late to enter Western thought, since in early Europe they were still using Roman numerals. It is very difficult to do math with Roman numerals, which does not even have provision for zero. (Try multiplying X times V in Roman numerals.)

There are some who believe that zero is not a number at all but a symbol for a place holder. For example, in the sequence, ..7, 8, 9, 10..., the zero after the one in the number ten simply signifies the start of a new sequence of units. Obviously, however, zero is enormously important in modern mathematics and science; how else could we describe Avogadro's number: 6.023 x 10²³ ? The concept of zero was described by a historian*: "In the history of culture, the discovery of zero will always stand out as one of the greatest single achievements of the human race." Maybe an exaggeration, but as a scientist and one who regularly does household accounts, it is hard to imagine how we could live without the mighty zero.

It will be interesting to see how the little Penguins will be introduced to the concept of zero.


* Dantzig, Tobias, Numbers – The Language of Science, 1930, p. 35.

Whom Are We Fighting?

I was immediately drawn into this picture when I first saw it on the front page of the New York Times of July 1, 2008. It is a very dynamic scene, made interesting by the feeling of movement of armed men wadding against a flowing stream. It raised this question for me: Why are these turbaned men, identified as al Qaeda in the caption, many with beards or face masks, wading through this stream?. This doesn’t appear to be like any of the images I have seen before of al Qaeda in Afghanistan, which are almost always against a backdrop of barren, mountainous terrain. This is a scene of refreshing waters in a verdant grove. My question unanswered, at the end of the day, like all newspapers, this newspaper was dutifully tossed into the recycling bin.

Over the course of the next few days, this image repeatedly would flash into my head at odd moments, especially before falling asleep or upon awakening. There was something about this scene that didn’t make sense to me. I was driven to retrieve the Tuesday newspaper from the recycling bin and to gaze upon it at length in order to figure out what it was about this scene that didn’t make sense to me.

At long last I had it: Are these the al Qaeda that we are fighting in Afghanistan because the al Qaeda are the ones who planned and executed the plot to hijack four airplanes and to fly them into significant targets in the United States of America? This image and this fact didn’t compute! Cognitive dissonance!

The 9/11 plot was a bold one. The twin towers of the World Trade Center not only stood tall physically, but they were concrete symbols of the economic power of the US in the world. The Pentagon is the seat of US military might. The White House is the cherished home of America’s sense of nationhood. Who among these seven men in the photograph would be able to identify such targets, and would be able to articulate the potential value of these targets for showing the strength of al Qaeda? Who among the seven could speak passable English, travel to the US, sign up for flight school, and organize the details of selecting four flights with the correct scheduling, so that the plot would have maximum impact by its simultaneity? I suspect none of these men could do any of that.

So now my question is this: If these are the al Qaeda that we are fighting in Afghanistan, what is the relation of these men to those who did have the smarts to plan and execute 9/11?

The usual rationale is that the Taliban who ruled Afghanistan after the ouster of the Russians supported al Qaeda. No doubt the Taliban was a very oppressive regime, forcing the rule of sharia, requiring women to dress in burqas, cutting off the hands of those for what we would judge to be a minor infraction. But will overthrowing Taliban rule in Afghanistan really eliminate the organization that masterminded the 9/11 attack on the US? Specifically, by subduing al Qaeda, these bands of turbaned tribesmen, how will this get to the planners and perpetrators of 9/11? Will this lead to the capture of Osama bin Laden or his closest confidant Ayman al-Zawahiri?

Truth be told: In fact the New York Times reports that this photograph is not taken in Afghanistan but in Algeria as part of an article showing the strength of a branch of al Qaeda there. This was revealed in the article and not in the photograph caption. Nevertheless, the image of bearded men in tunics and turbans is not unlike the images often seen of Afghans, save for the scenery. And although the article did not focus on Afghanistan, the photograph raises the question of our Afghan strategy. The Obama administration is increasing the military presence in Afghanistan by 17,000 troops and it does recognize that the war can not be won by military force alone. It is not surprising that al Qaeda tribesmen would be fighting against a foreign invader no matter the stated motive. The question remains: Will this new strategy avenge the perpetrators of 9/11, or will this turn out to be another Iraq, where we have decided that our stated purpose for going into Iraq was wrong?