Chapter 16
The Zero Hour
2It is fascinating to discover that in the nadir or zero hour of society’s Greek streamlined course, the mathematical symbol ‘‘0,’’ zero, entered our particular civilization factually for the first time. That low point maybe said to have been from 1000 to 1600 A. D. Although the Arabs had contributed to civilization not only a simplified form of mathematical symbology—their Arabic numerals, whereby every number was reduced to a unit symbol—but, also, algebra, which sped up calculation to a high degree, the Arabic numerals, as first introduced, did not contain a symbol for ‘‘nothing.’’ The invasion of Spain by the Moors, popularly thought to represent a retrogression of society, actually carried with it the great gift of number simplification somewhat as the bee carries pollen for inadvertent fertilization. The Arabs pollenized the growth of science and industry with the cipher.
3 At this point of history (1176) the ability to calculate was the gift of or was retained in the custody of a talented few. The art was primarily confined to monks or other members of the organized church.
4 Calculating was done then in two ways: one, by doubling numbers, which is an arduous method; the other, a superior method, with the abacus. This is a frame containing parallel wires or rods mounted with sliding beads. It still used by some Chinese merchants. It was closely guarded by the church because, through its control, the church was profitably able to act as the calculating intermediary in transactions or undertakings in general. Obviously, this was a power-building privilege. Common to both methods of calculation was the lack of a symbol for ‘‘nothing’’ which made it impossible even with the superior abacus to write down the result of any problem that developed a ‘‘blank column.’’ For instance, seven million three hundred and seven (7,000,307) might, also, have been ‘‘737.’’
5 It is a valid reflection that the non-inclusion of the cipher is accountable by the fact that the people had been so materialistic in their viewpoint that they had not conceived of any necessity of a symbol for intangibility, infiniteness or abstraction. Man had not yet penetrated the non-sensorial bands. The cipher (called cafrun in Arabic) had been imported by the ‘‘pollenizing bee’’ from the Hindus, but the Arabs did not bring it into the western world until approximately two hundred years after they brought to that world their system of simplified numerals and their algebra which latter were indeed limited without the cipher.
6 The repercussions of this introduction of the cipher were tremendous. The first Italian translation of the Arabic work that included the cipher was done from studies of the mathematician, al-Khowarazmi of Khiva, who indicated in his treatises a new facility for calculation afforded by a cipher, for instance, by using ciphers for the ‘‘blank’’ columns. This positioning of numbers immediately developed the method now daily used in multiplication, namely, the shifting of each successive line of product one column to the left. Originally a cipher was carried in the space now left blank. With the simple new arithmetic, instrumented by the cipher, any educated person could complete, in a few minutes, calculations that had hitherto required weeks, months, and even years. Try for yourself a multiplication problem using Roman numerals and you will realize the significance of this new development.
7 So important to commerce and the teleologic development of knowledge in general was this introduction of the cipher that merchants, who until then had been limited to laborious calculating by hand or by the employment of the priest and his abacus, discovered that they could now do their own calculating. However, the organized church chose to take an attitude of prohibition toward the new method of calculating by means of the cipher. So, throughout the period from 1200 to the late 1500 s, the church used its mighty power of political alliance with temporal rulers to outlaw the cipher, which in every country of Europe, was threatening church ‘‘privilege.’’ A bitter fight was waged for three and a half centuries by the ‘‘abacists’’ against the ‘‘algorists’’ (cipherists). Meantime, however, scientists and students throughout Europe had begun to calculate in the new manner. This proved to be so important that the populace began to call all calculating ‘‘ciphering.’’ The cipher was the key.
8 Merchants, especially needing the cipher, used it in stealth lest they be heavily fined. This led to the cipher’s acquiring a special meaning, namely, ‘‘secret code.’’ Popular ciphering, in general, and the ‘‘secret code’’ connotations so vulgarized the word ‘‘cipher’’ for the scientific world of the day that the Italian scientists were obliged to evolve the new name ‘‘zero’’ for the symbol.
9 The Arabs did even more in the pollenizing role than bring in Arabic numerals. They kept alive and now introduced into Europe the mathematical and geometrical attainments of the early Mediterraneans. The latter’s mathematical treatises, together with most important writings of the Greeks including many scriptures about the acts of the apostles and the prophets, had been filed in the great library of Alexandria. All of these works were destroyed during two successive vandalizations of the great library. Unfortunately, all of the eggs of science and religion seemingly had been placed in one basket. We have no known New Testament of earlier date than approximately 150 A. D.
10 Considering the chaotic state of society and its low mental rationalization ability in the early centuries A. D., it is safe to assume that the Bible testifies in a highly erroneous way to the doings and sayings of the prophets, which entitles us, in the light of scientifically revealed history, to latitude of interpolation such as outlined herein.
11 The Arabs had saved some eggs (the best of the scientific eggs) because of their need of mathematics and geometry in overland navigational problems. The Arabs constituted the transportation system of the times between Far Eastern and European civilization. They applied mathematics externally in their caravan navigation and found the use of angular measurement sights reliable. They learned that this conferred scientific prognosticating ability.
12 Being a mobile people, not only did they simplify their architecture (to the triangulated tent) but also every instrument and mechanical extension that they were under necessity of constantly transporting with them. They had to do all things with devices of the least weight and size and so quite logically reduced number symbology from multiple forms, derived empirically from tallying, to singular. In their mathematical coursing they invented algebra, which derives, etymologically, from aljebr, the reunion of broken parts, or jabara, reunited, in effect teleology.
13 In demonstrating the exquisite timing of evolution, it is interesting to observe that the Arabs, having borne the mathematical gifts in their mobile storage to European civilization, to which the front had again moved north-westward, were dispersed from Spain (the then dominant culture center of Europe) the verisame year (1492) as the discovery of the new continents of America. This latter event has effectively obscured the former in our egocentric histories.
14 The North American continent was to furnish the stage for the enactment of the drama already possible of formulation through the phenomenon inherent in the invention of printing (the Bible), compounded with the resurrected mathematics, as the mechanical extension means of society, a drama which was to world-unfurl the principle of industry instrumented by mass production and scientific leadership.
15 Just as the popular historical textbook has missed the main point of the Moorish invasion, stressing instead the names of princes and battles, honors and horrors, so, also, has it failed to stress the allimportant industrial significance of the scientific progression in this event of great discovery.
16 The discovery of the new clean slate of the American continents was, incidentally, a complete inadvertence so far as society’s volition was concerned. (‘‘Inadvertence’’ is now a specific factor known in science as the ‘‘random element.’’) If they had had sustainable mechanical refrigeration in Europe at that time, it is possible that the Americas would not have been discovered until much later. Spices were employed, then, in lieu of refrigeration, to preserve foods, and spices were available only in the Far East. The Turks had closed the way to the Far East via caravan, and were exacting high toll from Europe for the precious spices. Columbus, employing the already established theory that the world is round, set sail to the Far East (India) by going west. That he did not discover a western passage to India, Columbus never knew; he died believing he had, and indeed he was the first of the bees to pollenize the new continent with scientific instrument extractions.
17 One more scientific factor entered the scene during the zero hour of the Mediterranean philosophers’ streamlining. That was the concept of time as a segregated philosophic entity. We have already seen what an important factor time is in Einsteins formula, where rate of energy combines time, as pure abstract, with space, as pure matter. TIME entered the picture through poetry. Many, if not most, of the important scientific events that have occurred have appeared first in fun and play, as for instance the suspension bridge which appeared first as a Chinese tight-rope-walker’s frame. Funambulist= rope-walker; funis=rope; ambulare=walk. ‘‘Fun’’—‘‘rope’’—Will Rogers—line—tension—the ‘‘fun’’ of life.
18 Many scientific events have also appeared first as ‘‘tricks’’ of the organized priesthoods, though the inventors may quite readily have been laiety, conveniently ‘‘bumped off.’’ The priesthood employed the scientific gadgets to convince the populace that the priests had contact with unseen powers and anthropomorphic gods. The principle of syphonage was first used by Hindu priests to bewilder the populace. They used christening cups in which syphons were hidden. The cups would be filled with water almost to the brim and then, suddenly, at the critical level the water would disappear from the cup through a syphon inlet and outlet concealed in the base of the legs of a statuette priest holding a statuette baby. There is not only comforting thought but great import of vast future indispensability involved in contemporary radio’s 90% low ‘‘circus’’ programs.
19 TIME was first mentioned as an entity by Sappho, and from Sappho’s day was kept alive by the poets (by Goethe, quite prominently), pending expression in scientific formula. In this connection, Dr. Charles Beard, historian, has listed for the writer for incorporation at the present point in this book a list which he considers to represent the epochal changes in mans social growth:
- 1.
- Man discovers himself—Antigone of Sophocles.
- 2.
- Christian idea of tragic conflict between ideal and real.
- 3.
- The idea of progress (15th century); unfoldment in TIME.
- 4.
- The Christian-18th century idea of worth and value of human personality—not to be used for alien ends of slavery and exploitation.
20 The factor of TIME entering at the zero hour emerged eventually at the opening of the ‘‘twentieth century,’’ with Einstein’s formula signalizing the termination of the down-and-up streamlined course of society designed by the scientific philosophers of the Mediterranean. Throughout the intervening centuries man’s outlook was statically confined to the scientific formulas provided for him by those philosophers. This static viewpoint itself, which we now strive to break down, seems to have been included in the streamline design by the scientific Greek (despite his own secret awareness of time) almost as a hypnotic necessity to keep man’s nose to the grindstone until such ‘‘time’’ as the fixation of his attention upon mechanisms had developed self-extension into a satisfactory inanimate slave demonstration.
21 The emergence of the time concept as something more specific than the vague thing which a clock ticks away, a concept in which time is as essential a component or unit of the physical world as is oxygen, came with the advent of the cipher, the enabling instrument of time’s calculability.
22 At the instant in history when the demonstration of the sustainability of society by inanimate slaves had been potentially accomplished, as revealed on the continent of North America, Einstein announced his theory of relativity. This is a concept of the universe, all parts of which are in constant motion, as powered by unit energy in relative rates of speed of motion proportional to the frictional relationships of all the parts—a concept of LIFE as TIME itself. Einstein’s relativity concept was actually the first new thought of cosmic calibre to emerge since the 200 B. C. termination of the scientist philosophers’ declaration of social streamlining.
23 The ‘‘theory of relativity’’ marked, then, the birth of an extraordinary era, newly unfolding, in which man must expand the principle of inanimate slavery from out of its cradle in the industrial portion of society until it embraces and serves all people.
24 Sad as is the current warring in the orient, the inanimate slave is inevitably penetrating that vast area of the world’s population majority. As Miles Vaughn so aptly said: ‘‘Manchukuo is really the world’s last great West.’’
25 When the inanimate slave is omnipresent for the world’s populace, science predicts the maintainance of full-flowering bloom, after maturity, for man to his last days, and even the possibility of a continuity of living within the same mechanism when and if, in the fulfillment of this new era, this is desired by all men.
26 As soon as the full complement of inanimate slaves has penetrated the Orient, the rationalizations which started among these very people, in their mountains, the thought that originally evolved mathematics and invented fundamental structural principles will have girdled the world. It will have returned home, completely objectivized and, freed of all contaminations of interim personal equation tradition imposition, and the gap in the great circle will have been closed.