Sujet : Re: Spacetime
De : me (at) *nospam* yahoo.com (Athel Cornish-Bowden)
Groupes : sci.physics.relativityDate : 05. Jul 2024, 17:17:45
Autres entêtes
Message-ID : <leqklbF1m5bU1@mid.individual.net>
References : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
User-Agent : Unison/2.2
On 2024-07-05 13:01:12 +0000, gharnagel said:
Maciej Wozniak wrote:
W dniu 04.07.2024 o 23:10, gharnagel pisze:
Maciej Wozniak wrote:
Like numbers - nonexistent, right, Har, poor halfbrain?
Now you're getting the idea. Good job!
So - you don't believe that there exists the
smallest prime number, right, Har, poor halfbrain?
Such a stupid question doesn't really deserve a response, but
I'll be condescending to the poor eighth-brain.
Mathematics is a human invention. Basically, it's just
counting. We count things in the real world: apples, sheep,
fingers, etc.
Something I found absolutely brilliant when I first read it is the chapter in volume 1 of Feynman's Lectures on Physics, where he starts with counting sheep and proceeds in simple understandable steps to logarithms and Euler's identity (e^{i pi} + 1 = 0).
Anything else is frosting on the cake.
I like frosting (I have a degree in mathematics, so I obviously
do), but anyone who believes numbers, any number, exist as real
objects out there in the universe somewhere has bats in his belfry.
Well, in Wozzie's case we knew that already.
-- athel -- biochemist, not a physicist, but detector of crackpots