RE: William Lane Craig denies the number zero.
October 27, 2016 at 7:40 pm
(This post was last modified: October 27, 2016 at 7:40 pm by Jehanne.)
(October 27, 2016 at 12:57 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: Zero is perhaps kind of a special case. After all, no one can say that non-existence is the property of something, because if it was something then it wouldn’t be zero. It seems self-evident that ‘nothing’ does not exist.
Zero exists in the same sense that "blue" exists. While scientists can give a wavelength/frequency to the color "blue", that designation is arbitrary, but, nonetheless, it's something that all human beings agree upon, with extremely few exceptions. Likewise, zero exists in many senses; for instance, at 60Hz per second of AC current (in North America, 50 Hz in Europe), there are 120 times a second when there is zero current, because there is zero voltage, because the current, at that point, is reversing direction, sinusoidally from 120 Volts (times square root of 2) to minus 120 Volts (times square of 2), and so, we can, meaningfully, take about a zero electrical field or a zero magnetic field or zero current on a wire, or a zero drift velocity of valence electrons in a conductor. Does the current "disappear" at zero voltage? No, it's still there, but it really is in an idle state, neither positive nor negative.
And, so, the concept of zero, definitively, has many physical interpretations.