"Shortwave Sportfishing" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 14 Aug 2005 08:27:11 -0700, "Mr Wizzard"
wrote:

Coupla Q's:

What have muslims done to :
contrubute to the medical industry?
contribute to the Spaces Sciences ?
contribute to Environmental conservation?
contribute to agrricultural research ?
contribure to Internalional Food aid ?
contribute to Computer Science research ?
comtribute to religious tollerance ?
(i.e., can *I*, a white Amarican take
a vacation and visit Mecca?)

Hate to tell you this, but Moslems (or Muslims - take your pick) along
with the Hindus, invented the concept of zero. There is some dispute
about who invented it first, but it would appear that it may have been
a case of simultaneous invention, but some evidence indicates that the
Hindus came to it much later than the Pan-Arabian ethnic grouping.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 is called the Arab/Hindu (or Hindu/Arabic - all
depends on who you talk to) number system and without it, you wouldn't
have any of the above.

Curiously enough, it first appeared in the 1,000 BC in Babylon or as
we know it Iraq,by Babylonian mathematicians and/or astronomers. The
first "zero" was actually a blank so it would look something like 1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1_ 11 12, etc. It went from a blank to " at some point
(it's been a while - I'm doing this from memory). Eventually, sometime
around the 1st Century BC, a proper zero was developed, but went
through several iterations until it settled down to what we now know.

Curiously enough, Pan-European mathematicians/astronomers never
developed the concept until Arab traders brought it to Europe
somewhere around 8/900 AD. Europeans were using a positional notation
system, but it was confused and subject to royal fiat.

Why is zero so important? Couple of reasons. In the A/H number
system, zero is a place holder - example: 1101. However, it also is a
number - zero. So,as you can probably infer, 111 is very different
than 1101.

And I'm getting carried away. Let's just say that the positional
place-value system couldn't work without zero, that it was pretty much
invented by Moslems (or Muslims) concurrently with some other ethnic
groups and that, in fact, it took Arab traders to bring sense and
commerce to the Pan-European mercantile system leading, of course, to
the list you published above.


So thats IT? - their contribution to the above was a "zero" ?
(how ironic). But joking aside, this is "good". Is there more?
I mean, what you spelled out here is important (and thats good),
but lets build on that - lets see why there hasn't been more.
At some point we need to look at this, and understand why
they fell out of the game so long ago, and see what it will
take to get them back in to the game (if they want to). And
if they don't, we need to find out why, and what to do with
a self-destructive culture that doesn't (that happens to want
to take out the rest of the world). We've seen other despondent
and self-destructive cultures before, but one that wants to also
take out the other side is something we're not used to.
(Hitler didn't want to take "out" the world, he just wanted
to control it - very different).






Later,

Tom