时差N小时:数字零的由来(上)

Did you know that the number zero was discoveredby Hindu mathematicians around the sixth century?What? That's crazy! Zero is just a number. It's notsomething that you have to discover, just there.Well, actually what I mean is … isn't it there?That's… You know what I mean. That was exactly theproblem. Sure, people had the idea of a number thatstands for nothing, but they were confused by it.For many centuries the notion of number “zero” wasdisregarded as nonsense. The whole thing actuallyfrighten people. No,kid? No.Why Aristotle himselfargued that the idea of zero should be outlawed? because when you try to divide othernumbers by zero you don’t get anywhere. Zero times infinity is still zero!

【生词注释】

actually adv。事实上

stand for 代表，象征

confuse v.搞乱; 使糊涂

disregard v. 不理会

outlaw v. 使……失去法律保护, 宣告非法

infinity n. 无限大, 无限

【参考译文】

你知道“0”这个数字是由印度数学家在6世纪左右发明的吗?什么?那太疯狂了。“0”只是一个数字，那并不是你必须发明的，它就在那儿。是的，事实上我的意思是……它不在那儿吗?那是……我要说的。那正是问题所在，当然，人们脑中有这样一个什么都不表示的数字概念，但是他们被这个概念搞糊涂了。许多世纪以来，零的概念被当作胡闹而没人理会。零的事让人们感到恐惧。不会吧?你在开玩笑?我不是开玩笑。为什么亚里士多德争论零的概念是不受法律的?因为当你用0除以任何数字时，得到的仍然是0。0乘以无限大的数字仍然是0。