From: scerir (scerir@libero.it)
Date: Sat Jun 15 2002 - 14:58:54 MDT
Colin:
> The vagueness and inconsistency of the middle-east, being
> the net effect of inconsistent minds interacting for millenia
> would seem to present an intractable mathematical problem
> from this point of view.
Actually a celebrated book of seventh century A.D.,
the Vasavadatta of Subandhu, says that the stars
dot the sky like "zeroes", because of the "nullity
of metempsychosis", which is a bit difficult to
understand, at least by me.
> Are we missing something as a result? It's an issue I
> think about sometimes. Is there a place and/or a time when
> the 'irrational' operations involving zero are OK?
John Donne wrote "The less anything is, the less
we know it: how invisible, how unintelligible a thing,
then, is this Nothing!". Well, this is a better start
than King Lear's "Nothing will come of nothing".
Anyway a trick - but not an 'irrational' one - was pulled
off by J. von Neumann who identified zero with the empty
set and then identified one with the set which contains
the empty set ... et cetera. Using a "similar" trick J.
Conway defined a new family of numbers constructed out
of sequences of binary choices. This new way of generating
numbers encompasses the entire system of integers, real,
rational, irrational, 'surreal' numbers. Wow.
> The obvious ones: the Big Bang or maybe the very small or
> the very large or perhaps _the_ biggee - why there is anything
> at all .ie. not Nothing. The 'irrational' use of zero may prove
> productive in this area.
For the empty space, which is not "Nothing", the Casimir effect?
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/casimir.html
http://theory.ph.man.ac.uk/~jones/webtext/node3.html
Or the dramatic Scharnhorst (FTL) effect?
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0107091
[Is 'rational' or 'irrational' to use zero in equations?
Hmmm. Does zero mean conservation? Hmmm]
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