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It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to all computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of this achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.
Producers are the Primum Mobiles (the Prime Movers) of the world and business is the very motion which carries humanity forward. It was the rise of producers and the integral component of business -- Aristotelian philosophy -- in the 13th-14th centuries that broke the Middle Ages and brought the Renaissance to Europe. It was the same rise of producers and Aristotelian-oriented philosophies, implicitly employed, during the first five centuries A.D. in India that made possible one of the greatest mathematical inventions of all time -- the zero, without which the Renaissance and the subsequent development of scientific knowledge would not have been possible.
The zero is the mathematically defined numerical function of nothingness that is used not for an evasion but for an apprehension of reality. The "nothing" has been the exclusive territory of mystics and neocheaters. They thrive on "nothing", in nonreality, and create their mystical edifice of power and dominance upon "nothing" with "nothing". The zero is the only "nothing" thus far conceived that is nonmystical, i.e., reality-based. It is a tool, a mathematical tool, for dealing with reality, and as such is integral to the whole context of reality qua reality. After the Renaissance, the monopolization of knowledge became broken and scientific knowledge flourished owing largely to the propagation of this mathematical "nothing", the zero -- to the increased computational capability among common people that was made possible solely by the widespread use of the zero concept and its counterpart -- the place-value numerical system.
On the assumption that an Aristotelian-based philosophy rather than a Platonistic philosophy had dominated the Western world since the Golden Age of Greece, Neotech predicts the following retrospectively (see "Neotech Discovery", Neotech Advantage #77, An Aristotelian Course of History):
| 350 B.C. | Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) |
| 200 B.C. | America discovered. |
| 100 B.C. | Free-enterprise capitalism established around the world. |
| 0 B.C. | All traces of mysticism, altruism, are gone. |
| 20 A.D. | Electrical power developed, camera developed. |
| 40 A.D. | Internal-combustion engine developed. |
| 50 A.D. | Cars in mass production. Airplane developed. |
| 60 A.D. | Computer developed... |
| 70 A.D. | Nuclear power developed. |
| 80 A.D. | Man on the Moon. |
| 100 A.D. | Man on Mars and heading for other planets. |
| 120 A.D. | Human biological immortality developed. 200 A.D.Universal immortality achieved... |
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