Between something and nothing

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In June 2008 I announced I was writing a book. The working title is 'Living in the Cloud'. It is a book intended to help people understand computers, the internet and other technology they use every day. I plan to have the book finished by the end of 2008, and will post excerpts as I write them for feedback and criticism. The following is one such excerpt:

Between Something and Nothing

There was silence. Heavy and expectant. The silence of someone waiting for a sound, a signal. Then it came. A flurry of high-pitched blips, some meaning intended within a pattern of seemingly random noise, and then silence again. A quick translation of the code revealed the message - 'What hath God wrought?'

These were the words that marked the official opening of the telegraph line used for Morse Code in 1844. It is perhaps fitting that they were taken from a biblical verse in the Book of Numbers, for numbers are the very heart and soul of computers. Two numbers, in fact, which in turn represent an idea which has been crucial to the evolution of humankind since we first discovered the need to count. The difference between something and nothing.

All human meaning exists somewhere in the world between something and nothing. The art of computing is simply a way of creating meaning out of both. Morse Code was developed as a way to communicate over distance. It created meaning in the form of embossed dots and dashes on a strip of paper. A 'computer' at that time referred to the person who translated the dots and dashes into everyday language. Computers as we know them today may be only a relatively recent phenomenon, but the rules by which they operate are as old as civilisation itself.

5,000 years ago, the Sumerians used two wedges pressed into a wet lump of clay to represent the idea of zero. They had become tired of dreaming up new symbols for numbers and had worked out that by making the position of the numbers important, you could change their meaning. The same symbol for 3 in one column could mean 30, 300 or even 3,000 in a different column. The problem was how could you tell which column it was meant to be in without another symbol to mark its place? A symbol that literally meant nothing could mean everything. And so zero was born.

Nothing is everything when it comes to computers and indeed mathematics itself. Signalling in Morse Code using a flashlight, meaning is derived from whether there is light or no light. A code is then consulted which takes the length and sequence of this pattern of light and no light into account to produce a useful message.

A strip of paper with holes punched in it works on the same principle. If the paper was nothing but holes or had no holes in it at all it would be meaningless - it is the combination of holes and no holes that creates meaning. It is then left to a computer, whether human or machine, to decode the meaning and translate it into something useful.

It should come as no great shock that the weighty twin concepts of something and nothing are represented in our number system as the numerals 1 and 0 respectively. These two numerals in their varying patterns and sequences form a system of notation, and because it is comprised of two numbers, it is called the binary system. It is the binary system upon which the whole of digital computing technology operates.

Tagged as: between something and nothing, Living in the Cloud