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God created the real numbers

(www.ethanheilman.com)
136 points Bogdanp | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.249s | source
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andrewla ◴[] No.45067770[source]
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 representing the state even of a very simple system involves continuous quantities.

But the Cantor vision of the real numbers is just wrong and completely unphysical. The idea of arbitrary precision is intrinsically broken in physical reality. Instead I am off the opinion that computation is the relevant process in the physical universe, so approximations to continuous quantities are where the "Eternal Nature" line lies, and the abstraction of the continuum is just that -- an abstraction of the idea of having perfect knowledge of the state of anything in the universe.

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alphazard ◴[] No.45068318[source]
> Nature and the universe is all about continuous quantities

One could argue that nature always deals in discrete quantities and we have models that accurately predict these quantities. Then we use math that humans clearly created (limits) to produce similar models, except they imagine continuous inputs.

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adrian_b ◴[] No.45068573[source]
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, or more precisely the models that we can use to predict what happens in nature are still based mostly on continuous quantities, despite the fact that about a century and a half have passed since the discreteness of matter and electricity has been confirmed.

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gpm ◴[] No.45070139[source]
> 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.

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