Numbers –Tricky Tricky Numbers: Part 1
17 hours ago Kip Hansen 175 Comments
Guest Opinion by Kip Hansen – 26 July 2022
I beg your forbearance if I step on your ideological or scientific-viewpoint’s toes with my essay today. But I hope to attract your attention long enough to make a point so important that it affects almost all empirical knowledge in our modern world. The point is so simple, yet so scientifically profound, that it might even sound silly to casual readers:
Numbers are just Numbers
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The most famous and illustrative example (albeit, fictional) is Douglas Adams’, the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything“, as calculated by an enormous supercomputer named Deep Thought, is “42”.
This is precisely my whole point here today; with a rather long afterword on why this is important enough to mention here at a science blog. Readers who already understand why “Numbers are Just Numbers” is so profoundly true and those who already understand the significance of this for modern science can move on and read about (boring) climate change topics.
[ Warning: This is not easy essay – it is a short dissertation on the scientific philosophy of numbers and their use in modern science with some cautions and will extend to two parts, at least. ]
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/07/26/numbers-tricky-tricky-numbers-part-1/
