We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that one way or another.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Decision to Drop the Bomb

The Zero is an enigma. A ‘thing’ that is ‘not.’ A quantity less than 1. A philosophical proposition circumscribing Death, the Beginning and the Absolute. A null morpheme seemingly everywhere and nowhere. The invisible delta between each point in space and moment in time. A known unknowable immeasurable in nature. A yes-no proposition beyond comparison or correlation. A nonce through which all else is made knowable: “Just as the sun…not only furnishes to visibles the power of visibility but it also provides for their generation and growth and nurture though it is not itself generation…[i]n like manner, then…the objects of knowledge not only receive from the presence of the [negation] their being known, but their very existence and essence is derived to them from it, though the [negation] itself is not essence but still transcends essence in dignity and surpassing power.” A veritable black hole—a cosmic multiplier that reduces everything to nothing irrespective the particulars. The unseen mover of the universe, constituting the perfect beginning, to the extent the Zero does not follow anything by causal necessity, and the ideal end, in so far as the Zero does not demand anything follow afterward. An indivisible unity, cyclic and unchanging, utterly remote from imperfection: The One arguably depends on the Zero, the Zero though depends on nothing. Revealing a self-contained notion, peerless and without equal, resisting formal proof. A divine proportion imperceptible in situ though irrefutable in principle. An in-terminate void from which proceeds Nothing. Everything. And Self.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

1. Unknown.
2. “The Decision to Drop the Bomb.” Produced by Fred Freed. NBC White Paper. NBCUniversal. NBC, 5 January 1965. Television.
3. Plato. The Republic / Plato ; with an English Translation by Paul Shorey. Translated by Paul Shorey, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.
4. Dvaipayana, Krishna. The Bhagavad Gita and its Message. Translated by Sri Aurobindo and Anil Baran Roy, Twin Lakes: Lotus Light Publications, 1995. Print.
	 Ch 10, Verse 32: And I am all-snatching Death, and I am too the birth of all that shall come into being.
	 Ch 15, Verse 6: There we find the timeless being which is not illumined by sun or moon or fire (but is itself the light of the presence of the eternal Purusha); having gone thither they return not; that is the highest eternal status' of My Being.
5. Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9. Translated by Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925. Print. 
	Phaedrus 247a: There the utmost toil and struggle await the soul. For those that are called immortal, when they reach the top, pass outside and take their place on the outer surface of the heaven, and when they have taken their stand, the revolution carries them round and they behold the things outside of the heaven. But the region above the heaven was never worthily sung by any earthly poet, nor will it ever be. It is, however, as I shall tell; for I must dare to speak the truth, especially as truth is my theme. For the colorless, formless, and intangible truly existing essence, with which all true knowledge is concerned, holds this region and is visible only to the mind, the pilot of the soul. Now the divine intelligence, since it is nurtured on mind and pure knowledge, and the intelligence of every soul which is capable of receiving that which befits it, rejoices in seeing reality for a space of time and by gazing upon truth is nourished and made happy until the revolution brings it again to the same place.