Was watching Engineering an Empire on the history channel and the episode was covering the Mayan empire.
They were talking about how the Mayan empire “created” (don’t remember the exact wording used) the concept of zero. Which aided them in the designing and building of their structures and temples. And due to them knowing the concept of zero they were much more advanced than European empires/civilizations. If that’s true then how were much older civilizations able to build the structures they did without the concept of zero?
In: 395
There’s a lot of complex answers about mathematics and zero here, but there’s also one very simple aspect. You don’t need to know about 0 for the physics to still work. Sure, to write things down and solve equations, knowing about 0 helps a lot, but if you’re just doing something and figure out how the physics works in practice, you don’t need to know about the math behind it.
Like gravity. None of us know why gravity exists and acts the way it does, but that doesn’t stop us from taking advantage of it. We build hydroelectric dams and use gravity to move water through them to make power.
Other civilisations realised that if you put big rock on top of big rock in right way, top big rock stay where you put it. They might not have known why it worked, they just knew it did.
So while the Mayans may have worked out 0 and made figuring these things out much easier, other civilisations could still build fancy stuff just through trial and error or their own mathematical systems that others have explained.
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