Path: ...!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Athel Cornish-Bowden Newsgroups: sci.physics.relativity Subject: Re: Spacetime Date: Fri, 5 Jul 2024 18:17:45 +0200 Lines: 38 Message-ID: References: <46633b77bddb3b8bcf79567060ac4687@www.novabbs.com> <816c22cd6777f919d255d5b5a98551e6@www.novabbs.com> <3d05da1bc3e7044abccacfc8ea78eed4@www.novabbs.com> <0a665fd1dd94ee470ba43429fc105685@www.novabbs.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: individual.net Hq8Piz5+TIYu1kxL1dNTUgWmgF0TGp8nkdiJ45EeScPHCVQOfg Cancel-Lock: sha1:r4I9sZYRBjclPG6dmMavhqloVUM= sha256:y4Glju4LXpcj7mYLow2SYyIftcP4zOWT6aAWJ049lSs= User-Agent: Unison/2.2 Bytes: 2429 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