I had an interesting discussion this past weekend on the “beginning of things.” Someone making their case implied early on that “all things have a beginning”. One way or another, I got to thinking: do all things necessarily have a beginning?
For all physical things and processes, we can confidently say there is a beginning. The laptop on which I write this had, in some sense, a beginning—assembled from components, those from raw materials, and those from the Earth. My own corporeal self began at birth, preceded by my conception, preceded by my parents, and so on. Concepts are trickier, but they too seem to originate somewhere: the concept of love, for instance, could be said to arise when sentient, social beings first experience attachment, care, and longing. Time too, often thought a concept, I’ve read characterized through physical terms; that it is the direction of the increase of entropy within a system. (Carlo Rovelli’s “The Order of Time” was a fascinating read.)
It seems, then, that many things have a beginning “through inheritance”—by which I mean that because something is situated in or predicated on a physical system, it inherits that system’s origin. My being is a link in a long causal chain that stretches back to the Big Bang—or whatever primal event science one day settles on.
So, do all things have a beginning, given that we suppose the universe itself began?
I think the answer is no. To see this, consider the concept of zero.
Unlike physical objects or even social phenomena like love or justice, zero is not a presence but an absence. It is not just a placeholder in arithmetic, but a way of thinking about nothing. And that makes it strange. We cannot say it “came into being” in the same way a pancake or an organism did. Even saying it was “invented” by the Babylonians or Indians or anyone else is misleading—it was recognized, perhaps formalized, but not conjured from nothing.
Mathematics: Zero as Axiomatic Void
In mathematics, zero is not merely a numeral but an axiomatic anchor. It defines the baseline of quantity, the identity element of addition, and the boundary between the positive and the negative. It’s embedded in our number systems, but its existence precedes any formal system. Even before its notation, zero functioned implicitly in problems of debt, absence, and comparison.
Yet what makes zero especially odd is that, unlike the natural numbers, it does not “count”. You can’t point to zero of something and show it. It’s not there. But it is rigorously defined, indispensable, and recursively invoked in various axiomatic constructions. Zero is how we begin counting—and yet it’s a count of nothing. In that sense, mathematics treats zero more like a logical necessity, not a temporal invention. Once again, anything countable might have a beginning, one comes into being with the first thing, two with the second, and so on and so on. Even the collection of things as expressed by sets is haunted by zero; the null (or empty) set is a subset of every possible set! No matter what your mind conjures, zero lurks!
Es Muss Sein
Zero exists because it must. To even say “there is nothing” is to invoke it. Any universe, any set of conditions, any line of reasoning presupposes the concept of none, of absence—of zero. In a sense, it is the backdrop of all beginnings, all existences, like a silent counterpart. When we say love began with the first creature capable of love, we imply that before that there was none. Zero is the condition by which beginnings become intelligible.
So perhaps zero did not begin at all. Perhaps it is not something that was, but something that must be. It is not inherited. It is the recognition that there is such a thing as not. And in this way, it might be that not everything has a beginning. Some things simply are necessary, in order that beginnings themselves make sense.