This question came up on another thread which is now closed so I thought I'd ask what everyone thinks.
Hogweed thought I was avoiding his question and claimed that numbers and letters don't do anything unless manipulated. I might partially agree with this when it comes to letters, but numbers, ratios, constants, etc seem to play a far more fundamental role in the universe that letters do. For instance, all displacement boats hulls have a hull speed of 1.34 x square root of the waterline length. So, it seems that 1.34 has a causal role in the speed of the boat you are sailing. It's even a part of the intelligent design argument. Some people argue that there must have been a fine tuning of the cosmological constant in order to produce life on earth.
My view in the other thread, was if there was room for divine activity in the universe it was for action similar to the action of 1.34 since we obviously don't observe divine causes.
But I'm not so much interested in the theology of the question as in the role of numbers in reality.
Do numbers get us closer to what is real than words do? Numbers seem to play an ordering role in the universe unlike the other words we use?

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1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

Numbers are simply a way of logically explaining order and being.

From the time of Pythagoras onward,{undoubtedly much earlier as well} folks have attemted to use mathematics to give meaning to a coherent,orderly existance,albeit contrary to the general run of humanity with it's inherent contradictions,violence and passions, with all the things we call human.

Is there a divine order that can be explained in terms of numbers?The hebrew Kabbalists would have us believe so.

Music and Mathematics are inexorably intertwined,the 2 being quite similar, based upon fixed,finite rules, but life is not so my vote is nay.

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I agree. I seem to have an odd talent for remembering numbers (strange, since I can't recall names to save my life). Part numbers, phone numbers, addresses, etc. -- obscure numbers I haven't used in years. There is a rhythmic quality to numbers that allows me to recall them just as I might recall some piece of music I heard years ago. The recall mechanism seems identical to me.

Is it only an appearance that life does not function on fixed rules? If numbers can explain being logically, isn't this fact by itself quite remarkable because there is no obvious appearance of number in nature.

__________________
1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

Interesting. I've noticed the difference between my wife and myself. She has to look up all the numbers of our relatives if she has to call them, but I almost always remember them.

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1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

Before you even ask that, ask what kind of truth is a statement of the kind

2+2=4

Or what kind of statement is 2+2=4

A long time ago I read Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic where he thinks through the whole analytic/synthetic/a priori/a posteriori possibilities. Very interesting, think I'll go read it again.

Anyone here read Penrose's Emperor's New Mind?

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The flip side of that view is that only a certain set of physical constants and arrangements could result in conditions that would lead to life in the first place, so the fact that we are around to decipher the universe means that we are predetermined to find a universe that behaves in a certain way.

In other words, it very well could've worked out a different way, but if it did, we wouldn't be around to point that out.


Are you asking what the role of numbers is as used by humans? Or are you asking what the role of numbers is in the operation of the universe?

I've always been fascinated by the number of half tones in the musical scale: 12. I guess other scales have more tones but they're a little busy and strange for my taste. On a guitar fretboard, you can clearly see that the octave length is cleanly divided by 12, usable notes.

12 is a unique number. It is devisable by the first four integers. For some reason, it has obtained cultural value: 12 apostles, 12 members of a jury, 12 months in the year (Aren't there actually 13 moons?).

Looking further at the musical scale, there are 7 tones in the Do, Re, Mi scale. 7 seems to work for weekly division also. The 5 tones left over from the gleaning of the 7 useful tones, form a scale of their own, the name of which escapes me. You can sample this by doodling with the black keys of a piano, of which there are 5. There's a strong simplicity about the scale. It's harder to sound bad in it. 5 is involved as a useful building blocks of nature, from molecules to geodesic domes. We have 5 fingers. Coincedence?

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

Constants are more important than numbers.

Pi = 3.14159...

3 4 5 triangle

C = 3X10^8 m/s Speed of light

etc...

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Regards

Warren

Currently 1965 220Sb, 2002 FORD Crown Vic Police Interceptor

Had 1965 220SEb, 1967 230S, 280SE 4.5, 300SE (W126), 420SEL

ENTER > = (HP RPN)

Not part of the in-crowd since 1952.

I agree comppletely on the first point.

I was intending to ask what role numbers play in the operation of the universe. In fact, I think the question puzzling me is the extent to which we can say that numbers (or at least numbers as constants) are 'causes' of things.

__________________
1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

Numbers don't cause things, they measure things that already exist.

I don't think I can buy that. Individual existent things (like boat hulls), have their existence prescribed by fixed numbers. Numbers (constants?) are embedded in all existent things (I think). If it's not a causal relationship, then what kind of relationship is it? It doesn't seem a stretch to me to say that numbers are in some ways the DNA of all reality. It's odd that they can have this power without being objects themselves, or at least not objects in the material sense.

__________________
1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

did the number 1.34 just pop into someones head or did someone 'derive' that number from a series of equasions? and the number 1.34 itself: does it mean anything in the context you are using it in without multiplying it by the square root of the length of the waterline of the boat or boats in question? these are numbers being manipulated in a certain sequence in order to order things. the number 1.34 might just as well mean the average number of goals in youth hockey tornament in moose jaw, saskatchewan, or anything else. it is obviously an important number, i just don't think it 'does' anything independent of its use.

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0o==o0

James 4:8

"...let us put aside the blindness of mind of those who can conceive of nothing higher than what is known through the senses"
-Saint Gregory Palamas, ---Discourse on the Holy Transfiguration of Our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ


Centrally located in North East Central Pa.

The number is not being manipulated by anybody unless somebody is using the number to desgn a boat that produces a certain hull speed. The number appears to be doing the manipulating in the sense that no boat escapes it's determining effect. I don't know who or how this fact was discovered. Regardless of whether anyone knows the number or uses the number it is a factor in how fast boats can go.

__________________
1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

The number was manipulated when someone chose water as the medium through which the boat travels and chose to use feet and knots as the measures of length and speed. Use a medium with a different viscosity and density and you will get a different number. Likewise, measure your speed in meters per second and your length in meters and you will get a different number.

I still like the question I asked the other day. Was calculus invented? Or was it discovered? I was taught that Newton invented calculus so that he would have a way to explain his laws of physics. Some of you commented that the credit should go to Leibnitz, not Newton. The more interesting question, though, is whether it was invented at all. I think it might be a law of nature that was discovered, rather than invented.