Would you have the courage to try this?
David Belle floats in the air. His fate is about to become clear. He’s taken on a heavy debt which he’ll repay very soon, or his bones will break.
I’ve frozen him here, mid-flight, so that we can consider his plight. In this moment, he is illustrating for us a very clever trick in life: creating something from nothing. I hope to show you, even if you don’t care to put your own bones on the line, how to use this trick to your advantage.
First let’s look closer at David. Stunt man. Founder of parkour. Entertainer. Creator of a new artform. But in this moment, he’s just a carcass in midair. Gravity’s hooks are all through him, dragging him down.
In this frozen moment, we’ve caught him with his heels up on a concrete wall, body horizontal. He’s a spine shattering distance from the ground in central Paris. He’s stretched out, sinewy, staring with fierce intent at the spot where he plans to land. He’s jumped out from a balcony, to bounce off a neighbouring wall, and back on to the next balcony, and he’s in the process of trying to create something from nothing.
We’ll come back to David in a bit, to find out whether he lands safely, but for now, I’d like to consider what it means to create something from nothing. What deal with the devil must we do? What debt must we be saddled with?
Zero
Thinking of debt, money comes first to mind, so let’s talk about money.
Let’s say you told someone a lot of lies about yourself in order to get a date. Terrible idea. But you’ve done it, and now you suddenly need to find $200 out of nowhere to pay for dinner you’ve pretended you could afford. Where is that going to come from?
Let me show you a two fold origami to get you out of trouble.
Fold one. Take your zero money and notice something interesting about it. $0 is what you get if you add $200 and $-200. You can split your 0 into 200 and -200, no problem. No atoms have been created or destroyed. It’s absolutely legal to do that.
Fold two. Give the $200 to the restaurant and the $-200 to afterpay.
That’s it.
[The way things are going, you might even get really lucky. afterpay might go out of business before you have to pay them back…]
The same trick is available to anybody who wants to buy a new car, build a hospital or launch a geostationary satellite that they can’t afford.
The idea of negative money is odd. You can’t picture of pile of negative cash. But we needn’t worry. The entire banking and finance system is set up to maintain this illusion for us. Were we to peek inside, we’d see that the bank just gerrymanders all the plusses and minusses in a way that washes out as zero. They pair your $-200 with somebody who had a bit spare. Nothing was created or destroyed, except for a useful illusion.
The trick in general is this: whenever there’s a zero, or a nothing, you can split that zero into something that you want, and the opposite of what you want. You then separate the positive and negative in some way. In doing so, you have looked at a problem from a slightly different perspective - factored the world in a new way. And some kind of force or tension has been created, because in the real world, things want to collapse back to a comfortable zero if they can.
Often it’s the force of attraction, or the movement generated by that force, that you’re interested in.
Inverses
The mathematical concept at play here is that of identity and inverse. Mathematical identity has different meaning to the common meaning of the word. The identity is something that can be added to something else without changing it. Zero is the identity when we’re adding: we can add zero to anything without changing it.
But there are more mathematical operations than just addition. We can, for example, multiply. The identity for multiplication is 1. We can multiply anything by 1 and get the same thing back again. There are many more surprising examples of operations.
The identity is important, because it is using identity that we define the inverse of something. The additive inverse of 200 is -200, because when we add them together, we get 0 - the additive identity. Inverses of things are frequently not obvious, and it hurts your brain to think about them. We have to suspend disbelief, stop trying to visualise them and just accept their existence, because we can find a path through this looking glass world to somewhere we’d rather be. The wonderful thing is that we can always split nothing into a pigeon pair of a something, and the inverse of that something. We can always do that, if we can work out what the identity is, and what the inverse is. And then, we can separate the inverses: in time, in space, or into two separate accounts, and generate a force of some kind, like the other halfs of Greek mythology perpetually seeking to be reunited.
Once more for emphasis: there’s a path behind the looking glass, which returns us to another point in the “real world” which we could not have otherwise reached. Being aware that this path exists, and being able to discover it, is something akin to magic.
Another example
Now we’re going to jump the rails. We’re going to hop on over to an example so different that you’ll wonder if I’ve forgotten what we were just talking about. I will explain, I promise.
In 1975, Juanita Nielsen paid with her life for the debt she’d incurred. Her body has never been found, and the mystery of her murder never been solved. But this is not a court of law, where we have to be careful what we say. We can be cavalier and agree: she was bumped off by a property developer.
The beautiful row of terraces on Victoria Street, Darlinghurst is her legacy. A brothel, a backpackers, a nightclub, a cafe. This strip is a beautiful part of Sydney. It would not be around, and Nielsen would, were it not for this debt.
Nielsen was many things. Novocastrian, journalist, wealthy woman. She expended substantial energy campaigning against various property developments, most famously to protect the gorgeous row of terraces in Victoria Street where she lived at the time. Evictions were planned from the houses, so they could be razed and apartments could be built. Nielsen got in the way. She agitated through her journalism, her connections, her organisation of a green ban on construction. And ultimately, her murder was commissioned in order to get her out of the way, so the project could go ahead (it never did).
What mathematical identity did this situation revolve around? What debt was incurred? What force was created?
Identity here is a politically neutral stance. An untroubled, uncontroversial life. The one the vast majority of us lead. We stay out of trouble and try not to put people’s noses out of joint. We decline to stir. And so most of us have few fanatical devotees, but also few sworn enemies, and this suits us just fine.
There’s a way to split the crowd down the middle, though, by doing something daring, courageous, controversial. As soon as we stick our head above the parapet, we suddenly find that some people agree with us and some disagree - those are our inverses. Positive and negative ions of opinion. The more radical our stance, the more vehement our supporters and detractors. Juanita Nielsen took a stand. She wanted to get something done. And she knew that the price of motion is to generate forces. And in the case of political energy, a side effect is that you piss some people off.
Let’s be clear: the goal is not to piss people off. The goal is to get something done. Pissing people off is a byproduct that we sometimes have to tolerate in order to get things done. In order to create something from nothing.
Juanita Nielsen would not have saved Victoria Street without disappearing behind the looking glass. Tragically, she never came back herself, but her goal did indeed materialise.
Gravity
Let’s return to David Belle, who landed safely by the way - he’s a master of his craft. One thing he understands intuitively is that he maintains two transaction accounts: an account for potential energy, and an account for kinetic energy. Kinetic energy is motion. Potential energy is stored when you go uphill, and released when you go downhill.
Jumping from balcony to balcony high above the street, he’s quickly executing a batch of tiny transactions between the accounts. He has to hope he gets everything back to zero by the end, or he’s in big trouble.
At a standstill - which is not very entertaining to see on camera - his kinetic energy is zero, and his potential energy is not changing. When he jumps, he’s incurring a debt to gravity. He creates two imaginary ions: the energy he gains right now, and the energy that he has to repay a second from now. He’s split the identity, and separated the two inverses in time.
So what?
What if you’re not like David or Juanita, or you don’t own a bank? What are you supposed to do with this information?
I propose that this way of thinking is applicable in lots of areas. Whether you want action on climate change, or looking for love, or a new job, or you have an intractable technical problem, thinking in this way could uncover a new path forward. It’s not a trick - it’s simply one possible mental model to guide a search for answers. It comes with two challenges.
The first challenge is that it’s not easy to perceive what the mathematical identity is in any particular case, and after that, it’s tough to work out what the relevant inverses might be. And once you’ve done that, you need a plan to somehow push them apart - in time, in space, in people’s minds, or whatever it might be.
In lieu of a recipe for discovering all that stuff, let me give some examples.
A battery - an ordinary household battery - works by separating a mix of molecules into ones with positive and negative electrical charges (ions), and pushing them apart physically. It takes a neutral looking mix, and separates the components in a way that enables storing energy.
In the realm of trust, we can secure a fruitful collaboration with a promise - explicit or implied. We can take a neutral motivation, and create a powerful force for action by promising some future reward in return for present effort. A huge amount of work gets done in the world by people investing in some kind of joint effort in the hope that it will prove worthwhile in the future.
Even on the sports field, dynamic play is frequently created by polarising the field in some way: artificially creating pressure and vacuum in different places on the field to set things in motion. Again, starting from a neutral setup, and understanding how to group the intent of players to create areas of positive and negative pressure.
So the first challenge is being able to identify identities and inverses, and some medium within which we can temporarily separate inverse counterparts.
The other challenge is that it’s hard work.
Tension
Nothing comes for free.
Finding the identity of something, and splitting it into inverses is a purely intellectual trick. But separating the inverses takes work. Real psychological work, or real physical work. There’s a hidden path through, which we can find by parting the seas, but we need to be able to withstand substantial tension to tread that path. We need not only to be able to imagine inverses that can be separated, but to be able to hold them apart, possibly for a long time.
We have to find a source of energy, or a source of strength, to be able to do that. The first step on that road is to understand what’s going on: that the price of progress is hard work and distress. There’s no way around that. We have to embrace it. And then we have to get used to it, by practicing.
At first we should practice holding small weights. Maintaining small tensions. Embracing small amounts of distress. Over time, we get stronger. We can maintain more tension, and for longer, and eventually all kinds of hidden paths open up for us.