0= 1-1
What might it represent? That 1 and -1 add up to zero, of course.
But that is interesting. Picture the reverse of the process: not 1 and -1 coming together to make 0, but 0 peeling apart, as it were, into 1 and -1. Where once you had Nothing, now you have two Somethings! Opposites of some kind, evidently. Positive and negative energy. Matter and antimatter. Yin and yang.
Even more suggestively, -1 might be thought of as the same entity as 1, only moving backward in time. This is the interpretation seized on by the Oxford chemist (and outspoken atheist) Peter Atkins. “Opposites,” he writes, “are distinguished by their direction of travel in time.” In the absence of time, -1 and 1 cancel; they coalesce into zero. Time allows the two opposites to peel apart-and it is this peeling apart that, in turn, marks the emergence of time. It was thus, Atkins proposes, that the spontaneous creation of the universe got under way.