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After 2001: Our Neotech World



Increased commercial/business activities during the first three centuries A.D. in India called for further developments in navigational technology and astronomical science, and for an evolution of a written computational methodology for recording the process of calculations that were employed in navigation, astronomy, and business. To accomplish these ends, development of a superior numerical system that lent itself to written computation became imperative. It was among those sea-dwelling navigator-engineer-scientist-businessmen who kept and evolved the lineage of advanced knowledge from antiquity that the place-value number system with the zero concept was first developed. The Brahman scholars, the Pythagoreans of the East, further evolved and perfected the system nearly to its present formulation. By using only ten numerical symbols while assigning one of the ten symbols, the zero, unique meanings and functions, they succeeded in expressing infinitely large numbers and making complex numerical operations remarkably more simple.

In Sanskrit (the scholarly language of the Hindus), the word for the zero is "sunya", meaning "void", and there is little doubt that the zero concept originated as the written symbol for the empty column of the abacus. The abacus had been used around the world since antiquity to provide a facile means of accumulating progressive products of multiplication by moving those products ever further leftward, column by column, as the operator filled the available bead spaces one by one and moved the excess over ten into the successive right-to-left-ward columns.

Number products in even tens (such as the number 20 or 30) leave the first right hand column empty (void). When expert abacus users had no abacus available to them, they could remember and visualize the operation of the abacus so clearly that all they needed to know was the content of each column in order to develop any multiplication or division. They then invented symbols for the content of each column to replace drawing a picture of the number of beads. Having developed symbols to express the content of each column, they had to invent a symbol for the numberless content of the empty column -- that symbol came to be known to the Hindus as "sunya", and sunya later became "sifr" in Arabic; "cifra" in Roman; and finally "cipher" in English.

Only an empty column of an abacus could possibly provide the human experience that called for the invention of the zero -- the symbol for "nothingness", and that discovery of the symbol for nothingness had an enormous significance upon subsequent humanity. The zero, the cipher, alone made possible humanity's escape from the 1700-year monopoly of all its calculating functions by the neocheating power structure operating invisibly behind their governments and religions. It was also the power of nothingness, the zero, that raised the curtains of science during the Renaissance, which had been drawn by the master neocheaters since 200 B.C. (It is significant to realize that the positional numeration with the zero concept had been implicitly employed in the operation of the abacus almost in its entirety, including the zero being the null-value. The Hindu numeration was the written translation of that operation.)

Even if the zero with the place-value principle and its computation-facilitating capability had been discovered by the Alexandrian Greeks, by Archimedes or Apollonius, for instance, it would have been banished or even lost when the emperors of the Roman Empire amalgamated the vast power of the priesthood with their already-established military supremacy. Historically, Roman numerals had been invented to enable completely illiterate people to keep "scores" of events occurring one by one. The more complex Roman numerals were those used by their superiors, keeping count by their fingers -- V for five (the angle between one's thumb and the other four fingers) and X for ten (representing one's crossed index fingers). Since one cannot see "no sheep" or "no person", the Roman world had no need for a symbol for nothing.



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