From Nothingness to Non-Capture , A Reinterpretation of Zero

This paper argues that zero is not a sign of absolute nothingness, but a symbol marking a state in which something is not captured within a given sensory, observational, or relational system. Modern mathematics and science have used zero extensively as the language of calculation, reference points, absence, cancellation, initial conditions, and boundary conditions, and this use has enabled high degrees of operational efficiency and technical precision. Yet calculational efficiency does not by itself guarantee ontological legitimacy. Starting from this distinction, the present paper contends that what humans and living beings experience as “absence” should not be understood as the absolute annihilation of being, but rather as the loss of visibility, touchability, audibility, warmth, or relational accessibility of what had previously been sensed. The paper reexamines how the sense of absence is formed through the survival structure of living beings. When food, warmth, contact, caregivers, or familiar environmental conditions leave the operative sensory field, living beings mark that state as “absence” and use it as a signal for tracking and recovery. In this respect, absence belongs less to ontology than to the grammar of survival and pursuit. Zero should therefore be reinterpreted not as a symbol that directly represents the fundamental structure of the universe, but as an operational and cognitive marker formed within the limits of particular sensory and observational systems. From this perspective, the paper rereads probability, the separation of time and space, the distinction between particle and energy, and various markers of absence employed in modern physics. The fact that something is not directly captured does not immediately imply that it does not exist, and probability may be understood not as the language of nothingness but as the language of indirect capture. Likewise, time and space, as well as particle and energy, may be interpreted as different expressions or projections of a higher- order structure. On this basis, the paper redefines zero not as a sign of ontological nothingness but as a sign of non-capture, and argues that fundamental physics must reconsider the very way in which it uses the notion of “absence. ” In its extended argument, the paper repositions zero as a primitive cognitive tool and introduces the auxiliary sign @ to distinguish zero from near-zero states. This extension allows the nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function to be reread not as absolute nothingness but as states of symmetrical non-capture, while the critical line Re (s) = 1/2 is reinterpreted as the line of maximal equilibrium between two expressions of a higher-order structure. The same framework is then extended to the relation between time and space, Hilbert’s d⁴x, and the temporal minimal-structure formula, and finally to a reinterpretation of 1, 2, and 1/2 as the grammar of being-measurement, outward infinity, and inward infinity, through which 1/2 becomes the minimal symmetric boundary value at which bidirectional infinity and boundary arise simultaneously