Number
&
Measure

Human infants aren't born speaking the language of number

any more than they are speaking words,

and once they've learned what numbers mean,

they quickly learn that numbers are the best way

to solve all sorts of different problems,

sometimes the only way

But no-one learns the complicated stuff first.

They need to learn new things one step at a time,

and sometimes those steps need a way of understanding

that at first doesn't seem to make any sense.

And that is the way that the world of mathematics has grown from its infancy,

with successive steps being taken into

areas that previously were thought of as nonsense.

Zero doesn't count anything

in the way that all the numbers from number one onwards do,

so if it's not a real number why would you treat it like one?

Well, mainly because it happens to be extremely useful,

making all the rest of the maths a lot easier.

And so it was with so many mathematical developments,

it didn't make sense until it did.

But none of the world makes sense to the infant

until it starts to recognise things in the world around it,

things that are grouped together,

things that keep a certain shape,

things that move,

things that repeat.

From the very beginning

humans learn their mathematics

as the way the world has patterns and rhythms,

and the naming of numbers comes a little later.

Then with the numerical language

to define those patterns and rhythms,

their beauty can be displayed in ways that are evident

whether you know the numbers or not.

The everyday human experience of maths is imprecise,

and even when they use numbers for their practical purposes

rather than their beauty,

they are still quite happy for them to be only vaguely accurate.

Close is close enough.

They assume that their numbers have an 'ish' on the end.

But there are also times when they need

the finest precision of measurement,

such as the safety of engineering,

accurate prediction of stresses and strains and deformations.

But the quest for ever more precision of measurement

is at the heart of all the physical sciences,

and the methods now used for measurement of sub-atomic or astronomical observations

can have a precision on a scale so far beyond our direct experience

that they seem impossible to comprehend.

But that refinement isn't necessary when agreeing to meet up with a friend.

How close to perfect we need to get

depends on what we want the numbers for.

Humans can never achieve perfect accuracy in all their calculations.

In fact, some of their most important and commonly used numbers

can never be defined precisely,

like pi and the transcendentals,

so this slippery unreal nature of number

must be remembered

not just for engineering safety standards,

but also when dealing with other areas of human interaction,

with one in particular that has number at its heart

money

which applies tangible value to those numbers.

Business and politics, both claim to be deeply concerned with time and money,

but as money becomes more and more something mainly seen on a screen,

time is now also seen as something less fixed than we once thought.

Time will never seem the same again,

now we've thought about that light speed train,

and as we try to plot numbers back to the dawn of creation,

the scale of those numbers would seem to have

less and less relation to our experienced lives.

And still people try to insist that all of that creation

fits into their tiny human mindset.

Better to begin by recognising that the unity of creation

will always be beyond our understanding,

and that the name we give to that ultimate all-encompassing source of creation is God,

The Creator,

the Maker,

the Shaper.

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