The whole of the universe should be represented by the number zero rather than the number one.

When I ran across this contention on the blog of a pagan queer theorist (a queerist?) I decided to ignore this incredible statement, once my head stopped exploding, because it is, er – not credible. But since this idea has actually been seriously entertained by a few other people, I’m going to address it. I will not link to the post, even though the author proudly took credit, because I’m embarrassed for zhir.

In mathematics we use words and symbols to represent things that exist in the real world or to represent concepts that do not actually exist but help us to understand reality nonetheless. There is one cat in the picture to the left and two cats in the picture to the right. The numbers one and two have a physical, concrete basis in the real world. In the next picture, there are six images of cats, but taken as a whole this is one picture (or, as it is known in mathematics, one set). But what if there are no cats? We can designate a picture without cats in it as “no cats” or “zero cats,” with zero referring to cats that do not exist. Zero is is defined as having no existence. It is nothing, only a useful human construct for that which does not exist in the real world.


Now let’s look at the whole of the universe, represented by this whole uncut apple pie. We have one (1) pie, and when we take a piece of out of it, say one-fifth, we have one divided by five (1 ÷ 5) or 1/5. But what if we start with a universe of nothing? In this picture of the whole of everything represented by nothing, not even any pies, we can take a fifth out of this nothingness and have 0 ÷ 5 or 0/5, which equals zero. Another way of saying this would be that something cannot exist within nothing, or you can’t get something out of nothing.

We’re talking about numbers and math here, which involve definitions, so if you want to arbitrarily redefine things, you can call zero what used to be one and call one a purple rhinoceros and still be right within your personal made-up universe. The possibilities are endless in the realm of making stuff up. It stands to reason that this “zero is everything” idea should come out of the universe of queer theory, where queer includes all kinds of people who used to be straight but are now queer, along with all the queer people who used to be queer but are still queer. Queer means nothing anymore – in fact in postmodern queer theoryland everything means nothing anymore – so it stands to reason that nothing should now mean everything. It has a sort of balance.

But maybe the source of the confusion comes from the symbol 0, which sortof looks like a pie. It’s the kind of mistake a child would make. You might infer, if you didn’t know any better, that the symbol 0 is defined as the number one, a word which has an O in it. Those of us who are not queerists pay attention in the first grade, at least one-fifth of the time, so we learn our numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., and we use the symbol 0 to designate nothing or as a place-holder. I recommend the first grade to everyone who still calls themselves “queer” and thinks it means something other than “I’m an idiot.” It might mean no longer embarrassing yourself, or zhir-self, or whOever zoo say zoo are.