From zero to net-zero, the world is still entangled with the extensively disputed mathematical digit. The numeral of zero was first discovered in India, but it was systematically propagated by another genius.
Its origins most likely date back to the fertile crescent of ancient Mesopotamia.
Sumerian scribes used spaces to denote absences in number columns as early as 4,000 years ago, but the first recorded use of a zero-like symbol dates to sometime around the third century BC in ancient Babylon.
The Mayans invented it independently, circa 4 AD. It was later devised in India in the mid-fifth century, spread to Cambodia near the end of the seventh century, and into China and the Islamic countries at the end of the eighth.
Brahmagupta, a scholar and mathematician defined zero for the first time in 628 AD, its usual later operation and developed a symbol for it which is a dot underneath the numbers.
Afterwards, Aryabhatta, a great mathematician and an astronomer, used the zero in the decimal system.
All these historical facts appear to have lost their ground when the severe war of the tweets began, disconcertingly, over placing zero before the simple arithmetic number 3, though it should have been placed after the numeral.
The scene got altered as it was literally discovered in a tweet by none other than Amitabh Bachchan, who later apologised for the mistake. What he wrote showed a difference of 27 crore (103 crore, instead of 130 crore).
When the slow seething anger was pacified, another theory of net-zero dawned upon us. The 10-point plan marks the start of the UK’s path to net-zero by its prime minister Boris Johnson.
As the host country of the UN climate change conference (Cop 26 climate summit) at Glasgow in November 2021, Britain looks keen to set an example.
He has promised to mobilise £12 billion to put the UK in a direction to attain carbon neutrality by the year 2050, ahead of hosting the climate summit.
However, his net zero plan gets a fresh bump following a study revealing that blue hydrogen could be more polluting than fossil fuels.