A Son of the Rock

I’ve not done one of these for a while but nobody’s remarked on any of them so perhaps it’s just me who cares. Still!

What is the number that comes next in the sequence 5,4,3,2,1, ?

I disagree with the dictionaries on this one. Along with other definitions they give the name nothing to the number concerned.

But!
Subtract (or most likely “take away” if you’re young Tom Daley) 4 apples from 4 apples and, yes, you are left with no apples; but you certainly do not have “nothing.”
You have the bag they were in or the plate they were on – or the symbol 0.

To my mind nothing means absence of thing. A void. No thing.

The number in the sequence above is nought, or zero. It is not “no thing.” It exists as an abstract concept, the number 0, and is one of the only two important numbers in the universe. (The other is 1. The rest of the numbers, 2-9 and all the possible combinations of digits, are just window dressing; an effusion resulting from the world view of ten-fingered bipeds.)

Even the symbol, 0, is not “nothing” – I can see it there on the page or screen.
It was, I believe, invented in India – like the other nine of our so-called “Arabic” numerals.

Without the number zero modern mathematics would be complicated and clumsy, if not impossible (think Roman numerals – they had no zero) and the world would be a very different place.

I wouldn’t be able to post this, for a start. I wouldn’t have a blog. No-one would.

0 is certainly not “nothing.”