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God created the real numbers

ethanheilman.com

121–130 of 226 posts

Re: God created the real numbers

#121

God created the rational numbers. The universe requires infinite divisibility, i.e. a dense set. It doesn't require infinite precision, i.e. a complete set. Our equations for the universe require a complete set, but that would be confusing the map with the territory. There is no physical evidence for uncountable infinities, those are purely in the imagination of man.

The physical evidence is quite irrelevant in this case, and there also is no evidence that uncountable infinities do not exist. This is a problem of modeling optimization. The models based on uncountable "real" numbers are logically consistent and simple to use, so they are adequate for predicting what happens in natural or artificial systems. All attempts to avoid the uncountable infinities produce models that are b…

The real numbers require infinite storage and infinite computation. There are both distinctly unphysical concepts.

The real numbers are a useful mathematical trick that make it possible to prove results in calculus. What you surrender in return for being able to prove statements is to give up the ability to compute expressions. This may be a worthwhile trade-off for physicists but for the universe (which does many computations and zero proofs) it's quite a burden.

Re: God created the real numbers

#122
post #3

I'm an enthusiastic Cantor skeptic, I lean very heavily constructivist to the point of almost being a finitist, but nonetheless I think the thesis of this article is basically correct. Nature and the universe is all about continuous quantities; integral quantities and whole numbers represent an abstraction. At a micro level this is less true -- elementary particles specifically are a (mostly) discrete phenomenon, but…

You know it wouldn't be possible for us to tell the difference between a rational universe (one where all quantities are rational numbers) and a real universe (one where you can have irrational quantities). The standard construction for the real numbers is to start with the rationals and "fill in all the holes". So why even bother with filling in the holes and instead just declare God created the rationals?

Because the square root of 2 exists.

Re: God created the real numbers

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are rationals special? They represent an exactness in a similarly unphysical way as the integers. The rationals are infinitely precise. 1/3 is not the same as 0.33333 or 0.33333333 or 0.3. The real numbers exist and are approximable, either by rationals or by decimal expansion. The idea of approximability and computability are the critical things, not the specific representation.

I am confused why you think the exactness of integers and rationals is unphysical. "This egg carton has 12 eggs" is a (boring) physical statement. "You can make 1/3rd of a carton of eggs without cutting an egg" also seems perfectly physical to me. Your problem with zero-point-three-repeating is a quirk of decimal representation, not a mystical property of 1/3. Egg cartons might sound contrived but the reals don't nec…

I take a unit square. It's diagonal is a real number but not rational.

Re: God created the real numbers

#125
post #30

> If the something under examination causes a sense of existential nausea, disorientation, and a deep feeling that is can't possibly work like that, it is divine. This is a Jewish and Christian conception of God. How can this be true when so many things that give us comfort in the natural world: fresh fruit, shade trees, sunshine and warm sand between our toes, etc., were not created by man? Even in mathematics itsel…

[deleted]

Re: God created the real numbers

#126
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quantity of matter and the quantity of electricity are discrete, but work, time and space are continuous, like also any quantities derived from them. There have been attempts to create discrete models of time and space, but nothing useful has resulted from those attempts. Most quantities encountered in nature include some dependency on work/energy, time or space, so nature deals mostly in continuous quantities, o…

> but work, time and space are continuous I'm under the impression that all our theories of time and space (and thus work) break down at the scale of 1 plank unit and smaller. Which isn't proof that they aren't continuous, but I don't see how you could assert that they are either.

The Planck units are bogus units that do not have any significance.

Perhaps our theories of time and space would break down at some extremely small scale, but for now there is no evidence about this and nobody has any idea which that scale may be.

In the 19th century, both George Johnstone Stoney and Max Planck have made the same mistake. Each of them has computed for the first time some universal constants, Stoney has computed the elementary electric charge in 1874 and Planck has computed the 2 constants that are now named "Boltzmann's constant" and "Planck's constant", in several variants, in 1899, 1900 and 1901. (Ludwig Boltzmann had predicted the existence of the constant that bears his name, but he never used it for anything and he did not compute its value.)

Both of them have realized that new universal constants allow the use of additional natural units in the system of fundamental units of measurement and they have attempted to exploit their findings for this purpose.

However both have bet on the wrong horse. Before them, James Clerk Maxwell had proposed two alternatives for choosing a good unit of mass. The first was to choose as the unit of mass the mass of some molecule. The second was to give an exact value to the Newtonian constant of gravity. The first Maxwell proposal was good and when analyzed at the revision of SI from 2018 it was only very slightly worse than the final choice (which preferred to use two properties of the photons, instead of choosing an arbitrary molecule besides using one property of the photons).

The second Maxwell proposal was extremely bad, though to be fair it was difficult for Maxwell to predict that during the next century the precision of measuring many quantities will increase by many orders of magnitude, while the precision of measuring the Newtonian constant of gravity will be improved only barely, in comparison with the others.

Both Stoney and Planck have chosen to base their proposals for systems of fundamental units on the second Maxwell variant, and this mistake made their systems completely impractical. The value of Newton's constant has a huge uncertainty in comparison with the other universal constants. Declaring its value as exact does not make that uncertainty disappear, but it moves the uncertainty into the values of almost all other physical quantities.

The consequence is that if using the systems of fundamental units of George Johnstone Stoney or of Max Planck, almost no absolute value of any quantity can be known accurately. Only the ratios between two quantities of the same kind and the velocities can be known accurately.

Thus the Max Planck system of units is a historical curiosity that is irrelevant for practice. The right way to use Planck's constant in a system of units has become possible only 60 years later, when the Josephson effect was predicted in 1962, and SI has been modified to use it only after other 60 years, in 2019.

The units of measurement that are chosen to be fundamental do not matter in any way upon the validity of physical laws at different scales. Even if the Planck units were practical, that would give no information about the structure of space and time. The definition of the Planck units is based on continuous models for time, space and forces.

Every now and then there are texts in the popular literature that mention the Planck units as they would have some special meaning. All such texts are based on hearsay, repeating affirmations from sources who have no idea about how the Planck units have been defined in 1899 and about how systems of fundamental units of measurement are defined and what they mean. Apparently the only reason why the Planck units have been picked for this purpose is that in this system the unit of length happens to be much smaller than an atom or than its nucleus, so people imagine that if the current model of space breaks at some scale, that scale might be this small.

Re: God created the real numbers

#127
I am a finitist and constructionist at heart.

Sure, mathematical abstractions and infinite structures are fun to play around with..

But go ahead and actually provide me the list of all naturals. You can not. Ever.

Re: God created the real numbers

#128
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quantity of matter and the quantity of electricity are discrete, but work, time and space are continuous, like also any quantities derived from them. There have been attempts to create discrete models of time and space, but nothing useful has resulted from those attempts. Most quantities encountered in nature include some dependency on work/energy, time or space, so nature deals mostly in continuous quantities, o…

> but work, time and space are continuous I'm under the impression that all our theories of time and space (and thus work) break down at the scale of 1 plank unit and smaller. Which isn't proof that they aren't continuous, but I don't see how you could assert that they are either.

[deleted]

Re: God created the real numbers

#129
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but work, time and space are continuous I'm under the impression that all our theories of time and space (and thus work) break down at the scale of 1 plank unit and smaller. Which isn't proof that they aren't continuous, but I don't see how you could assert that they are either.

The Planck units are bogus units that do not have any significance. Perhaps our theories of time and space would break down at some extremely small scale, but for now there is no evidence about this and nobody has any idea which that scale may be. In the 19th century, both George Johnstone Stoney and Max Planck have made the same mistake. Each of them has computed for the first time some universal constants, Stoney h…

The Planck length is at least around the right order of magnitude for things to get weird. If you have the position uncertainty of something be less that ~ a Planck length, and it’s expected momentum equal to zero, by Heisenberg position momentum uncertainty, the expectation of the square of the momentum is big enough that the (relativistic) kinetic energy is big enough that the Schwartzchild radius is also around the Planck length iirc?

Re: God created the real numbers

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know about you, I can work with it just fine. I know its properties. I can manipulate it. I can prove theorems about it. What more is there? In fact, if you are to argue that we cannot know a “raw” real number, I would point out that we can’t know a natural number either! Take 2: you can picture two apples, you can imagine second place, you can visualize its decimal representation in Arabic numerals, you can…

You can hold a two in your head, but you can't hold a number with infinitely many decimal places. Any manipulations you do with the real 2 are done conceptually whereas with the natural 2, its done concretely.

The decimal places are just a way of representing it.
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