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What about negative numbers? Or complex numbers? They are only tools, which can be quite useful to build models of the world with predictive powers but shouldn'
by ithkuil 5y ago
What about negative numbers? Or complex numbers? They are only tools, which can be quite useful to build models of the world with predictive powers but shouldn't be confused for the underlying reality.
Even whole numbers are an abstraction that makes sense only when you can clearly define what is the thing you're counting.
- tsimionescu 5y agoWhole numbers can be defined and proven to be necessary to describe the world pretty easily. From there, rational numbers are trivial to define. Negative numbers are somewhat more abstract, but they have very intuitive definitions in many domains, such as accounting. It may be possible to avoid them in a theory of physics, though. The complex numbers (well, at least those with a rational imaginary part and a rational real part) have been recently proven to be necessary to describe the universe[0] (assuming quantum theory is correct). The irrational numbers are then are the only numbers that are harder to pin down, and I'm not sure that there is a way to prove that any physical quantity has an irrational value, vs a rational value that is arbitrarily close to that irrational value. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.10873 https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.10873
- ithkuil 5y agoInfinity may be also "necessary to describe the world". But like every tool, you need to know its limits.
- tsimionescu 5y agoI'm not sure that it could be, actually. You can't use a finite amount of evidence to verify that something is infinite, so any infinity can always be replaced with a huge (or minuscule) number and the theory would make the same measurable predictions.
- ithkuil 5y agoI'm not talking about proving that there exist infinite things. I'm talking about using the abstract concepts of infinity as a useful mathematical tool to produce predictions. Notable example: calculus
- tsimionescu 5y agoSure, but calculus makes infinity sufficient, but not necessary for describing the physical world. Integers, rationals, and apparently complex numbers (presumably those with rational components) are actually necessary for describing the physical world, given our current understanding. Irrational numbers and infinities are extremely useful, but not strictly necessary.
- ithkuil 5y agoSorry, I'm not getting it. A large use case for complex numbers is describing things that rotate, literally or not, like oscillations, waves etc. Trigonometry lies deeply in that math and the irrational number pi pops out left and right. An approximation of pi wouldn't cut it, would it?
- tsimionescu 5y agoActually, for any practical use case or possible observation, there is an approximation of Pi that is good enough. The ancient Egyptians apparently did quite well in their architecture approximating Pi as 22/7 (3.(1428571)). You only need the exact number Pi if you want to measure something like the ratio between the length of a perfect circle and its radius with infinite precision. But you can't be sure your measurement has infinite precision with a finite number of measurements, and so you can't observe the difference between a perfect circle and a many, many sided X-agon, even if perfect circles do exist in the geometry of the universe. Just as a fun aside, even if perfectly circular shapes do exist, it's unlikely that perfect circles would exist in physical objects - at best, you would have ellipses, and there is no (known?) way to compute the ratio between the length of an ellipse and the properties of its foci.