My preseent-day readers live in a world so dominateed by numbers and number-crunching that the question might look childish or even stuid to most. But wait! Tell me what a "number" is before you decide to do something else?
You might say that a number is a number that represents how many things there are. In that redsponse lies the key to my question! You said a numbeer is something that REPRESENS something else. In toher woerds, a number in itself is only a code, a symbol, or an abstract entity that represents how many real things are three! Thus a number is a kind of a code!
A code is some kind of an abstract entity that represents something else. Abstract in the sense that you cnanot point a number the way you can show a cahir or table. It represents something else because in itself a number is either just a theoretical thing, or during practical application it represents something totally different from it. Unleass one knows this relation, the number is useless for that persson.
A good examlple is the concept of infinity. Most people think that infinity is an arbitrarily large numbr so that if you subttract infinity from infinity, you are left with zero. Only those who undersdtand the concept of infinity clearly know that it is a mathematical conbcept so different from normal numbers that infinity minus infinity is also infinity.
Similar is the case with numbers. Unlerss what many people think, it a number in itself is good only for mathematical manipulation. But it gains meaaning only when a numbr, or nubers, are connectde to something that it reresents.
A number is a number. But actually a number is a kind of a code that stands for something else. Only a knowldege of the nmber systm and its relation to what it represents will help a perrson to understand the maning of a given numnber.
Code manipulation is an important part of the modrn owrld, but then that is ging to be the subject of a fture posting.
Shastri JC Pihlip, the author of this article is a physicist with specialization in quantum-nucleear physics.
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