The Accountant of Tripoli. Al Muhasib

Transcription

1 Three points form an equilateral triangle that is constructed simply with two equal circles. Three points define a plane. (Euclid) The Accountant of Tripoli Al Muhasib (ال محا سب) Becoming old it happened more often that Leo did not remember more than three things at a time. For example, when he went out to go somewhere with the car, he remembered to take: 1- his wallet (which contained money and the driver's license) 2- car keys 3- the phone to call for help in case of accidents. If his wife, as often happened while he was organizing to leave the house, yelled from the kitchen: "Take the keys of the letter box and go to Pozzallo to see if we got any mail! Then stop at the bakery for bread! " Leo invariably forgot or his wallet or his mobile phone and instead he took the keys to the mailbox. Sometimes he forgot the car keys but that was not a problem. When he was about to open the car s door, he realized that he didn t have them and came back to take them. The problem was more serious however with the lack of the wallet, because if the Police had stopped him on the road, they would give him a fine for driving without a license, or if he miraculously remembered to go to the bakery, he had no money to pay.

2 Leo being a person who loved to find the hidden meaning of things, cutting each hair into four logical slices (as they say), had raised the issue in a serious way and this is what he was able to find out. The human being can t remember more than three things at a time, because for three points passes one plane and one only, and three points are the only threedimensional space that a human being can conceive. The problem had repercussions in religious terms and Leo was one that analyzed the Bible in detail, rather he was one that could be considered a Talmudist, for the enormous effort and zeal that he had employed to understand word for word what was written in the book of Genesis. He had arrived even to learn the Hebrew text by heart and had compared it with the Maronite Bible written in Arabic, to be sure to interpret well what was written. The conclusion of his studies of the Old Testament was that God had created man as a three-dimensional being (and not as a four-dimensional one, as asserted by Einstein, who had added time as the fourth dimension). Man was a human being with his feet resting on the Earth, a slow-moving being that had no notion of the fourth dimension, that of time, because in reality, according to Leo, time didn t exist neither for man nor for God. Let's start from the fact that time does not exist. The reasoning which led Leo to eliminate time was after all simple in its crystalline logic: for God time did not exist, because being eternal, He was living in an eternal present, where past and future were united together in one motionless reality. For men, the situation was a bit more complex, but easily understandable. Man lived in a constant evolution, in which time was an imaginary dimension created by his own mind to understand a fleeting future that did not exist and that just as it occurred, immediately turned into an ephemeral present that instantly became past or better said became a motionless fossil, a fossil shell of the present and of the future. Only this present had a meaning, but it was so short, that its existence was reduced to zero. It is worth analyzing in detail also the mental process that Leo had developed to arrive at conclusions that "man is a sinner because he can not remember more than three commandments at a time" and the Ten Commandments are too many to

3 remember. It was not the fault of man if he sinned, because it was hard for him to remember all the commandments. Once demonstrated that there is no time, what evidence had Leo for his theory of sin? It was scientifically proven that men, since ancient times, could not count more than three. Let us now analyze the difficulties that men have to remember or imagine more than three things at a time. In his latest book, The Museum of numbers, that Leo was reading, the great mathematician Piergiorgio Odifreddi had given irrefutable proof of the concept that early humans could not count much more than two, sometimes arriving at the most at three, but with hard work. For the ancient human beings three amounted to many, in fact, in the French language has remained the "trés" to mean much, as "trés bon", which means three times good or a lot of good. Then Leo had clear before himself the living model of this truth, materialized in the unforgettable figure of Al Muhasib, a character from Tripoli that he met almost every day during his wanderings through the streets of that city, during the lunch break, that at the Waha Oil Company was very generous: two hours, to allow the Libyans to go to the mosque to pray the noon prayer, then eat and finally to enjoy a long refreshing nap, to rest from having not done anything all morning and prepare psychologically not do nothing during the whole afternoon. At Muhasib, as they called them, meant in Arabic "the accountant" or rather "the bookkeeper", and that was a nickname assigned to him by Leo and shared without discussion by the two Turks, Racip and Yasher, that were Muslims and although they did not know Arabic they trusted Leo. The three friends and colleagues, Leo and the two Turks, formed a stable triad and a very solid one indeed. It was a Mediterranean brotherhood that the three shared, both culturally and genetically. They were all descendants of the same ancient ethnicities: the Hittites, who were the ancestors of the Etruscans and therefore of the Romagnoli ( Leo was a Romagnolo ) and also of many Turks, the Hyksos and the barbarian hordes of Genghis Khan, whose aggressive genetic program was diluted in the blood of all the Europeans. Then there were the Greeks, the Romans of the Eastern Empire and finally the Jews, from which the Mediterranean peoples had inherited the ability to analyze the Absolute and its paradoxes and from whom they inherited the theory of the Unity of God which, however, in addition to being One was also Triune.

4 At Muhasib was a young man, in his thirties, with a normal face for the Mediterranean standards: you could put him in Sicily, in Greece or Malta, but not in Oslo, because the Norwegians would have quickly noticed him for his curly black hair and the olive skin complexion that was slightly tanned. He walked a little bent forward with his eyes unfocused, because according to Leo, he was always calculating something. After twenty steps under the arcades of Tripoli (built by the Italians), he would stop and resting his right hand on a column of the porch, was beginning to count, with the left hand. His eyes were focused on the movements of his left hand, which were always the same. He opened the thumb first, then the index and then the medium, one, two and three. Then stopped. He then opened his left hand and with the characteristic gesture of those who want to hunt a fly, waving his open hand before his eyes he continued to walk thoughtfully. After a few steps he would begin to do the same things again. This behavior was discussed at length, and the discussion occupied the lunch break of the three friends of the Mediterranean triad. After eating a frugal "ta'amia" made with mashed flat beans, they sat in a small outdoor cafe on the seafront of Tripoli, in the shadow of the old ficus benjamina trees planted by the Italians in ancient times and to kill the time they were discussing what happened. Why Al Muhasib counted only up to three? The three colleagues, despite being of the same culture and the same Mediterranean tradition, had different mental characteristics. Leo was an exegete of the Bible and a Geologist strong in geometry. Racip was a Geologist, skeptical and iconoclastic but strong in computer science and good with computers and Yasher was a Geophysicist, very strong in mathematics, in fact no one understood his formulas. Their opinions, then, reflected three different points of view that could be summarized in the following way: 1- For Leo Al Muhasib was trying to uncover the mystery of the Trinity, but failed. 2- For Racip instead he was working on a mathematical trinary theory to be applied to the computer, to replace the binary, that was too slow. 3- For Yasher instead he tried to fill the three dimensional space with just three points because he could not count up to four to form a tetrahedron, which is the most compact Platonic solid, and therefore he was lost in the empty flat place filled only with triangles.

5 During those long lunch breaks, in the shade of the ficus benjamina, after drinking coffee, many theories, also of fundamental scientific importance, were formulated. Theories never published to make them known to the general public, because they would never be accepted and neither understood. One was the trinary mathematics of Yasher, which formed the basis for the study of Racip for a new faster system to operate the computer and then also helped Leo to understand the workings of the Universe, and of the Creation and of God. The trinary mathematics of Yasher (which was never developed) was based on the simple concept that while zero could only be zero, being the only number that always stays the same, the one could be either +1 or - 1 and then had a double nature which could be exploited to create positive and negative realities. The three key numbers were: 0, +1 and -1. One could also, according to Racip, build computer systems which analyzed the newspaper reports. The 0 corresponded to the phrase "no comment", + 1 corresponded to the phrase "good news" and to - 1 corresponded to the phrase "bad news". A kind of Face Book in which in addition to no comment and thumbs up, thumbs down was added to indicate dissent. For Yasher + 1 was the field where reigned inertia and gravity (which caused the concentration of matter and black holes) and - 1 was that of the negative realities where reigned expansion and dilution of matter (that caused dark energy and dark mass). In one type of reality were used 0 and + 1, as fundamental building blocks to construct the reality. In the second type, were used 0 and - 1, to build the complex numbers, the tachyons and antimatter. Almost twenty years had passed since that happy time and who knows what had happened to Al Muhasib. Was he still alive, because he should not be more than fifty years old? Did he continue to count by three, to fill the space with triangles? Or had he reached a milestone with his calculations? Al Muhasib had never spoken and never had solved the mystery of his calculations. There remained, however, traces of his presence in the subsequent work of Leo, that relying on Al Muhasib, had decided that only three numbers were enough to describe God and reality. These were: 0, 1 and and with those numbers Leo had built his Kabbalah. In any case he could only remember only three things at a time. It must be said, however, that Leo had been forced later to add a fourth number: - 1, to understand the operation of the tachyon, whose negative mass allowed it to travel at infinite speed and therefore was useful to God to send His orders to His infinite kingdom.

6 Besides all other arguments the fourth number explained the complexity of the Tetragrammaton, the holy name of God: YHWH, which was not pronounceable but could be analyzed with mathematics. That's the conclusion of Leo, the Kabbalist, on the meaning of the Holy Name. The Holy Name was a tetrahedron at the apices of which were positioned these four numbers, with which one could build all reality: 0, +1, and - 1. The two letters H were almost equal to each other, but they differed only in the + and - signs that distinguished them. At Muhasib, had contributed to all these important discoveries. You never know under what stone or under what dung heap is hiding the next diamond! This was a truth that perhaps had never been written anywhere, but that Leo continued to cite when he had the opportunity to do so.