The way it is

I am not feeling quite so hungry as my dear friend, so I shall give her half of my cake, the bigger half. You know what I mean do you not. You know that I can split a cake in two. You can split it unequally but still regard it as a half. Rather than talk about co-considerational selfishness, me feeling good about giving her a little more of what I have, I want to talk about splitting things. Half a cake is never half a cake no matter what level of precision your scales are. Half a cake is x zillion cake atoms. She gets x zillion cake atoms, I get x zillion cake atoms. Our marvellous imagination can conjure up concepts that make sense to us but have no place in reality. A cat eating a two-storey concrete house. You sure can visualise it, but no cat can munch through steel reinforced concrete.

All non-integer numbers are figments of our imagination. You can only have whole numbers of things. You cannot have half of anything. You can’t have a third of anything. Not in physical form. Only by representation. I want 1.5 chickens. You know what I mean, it makes sense. Half a chicken tends to be poultry rather than a functioning bird that takes its place in the pecking order.

A chicken is a congregation of parts. Enough parts in place for us to deem it a chicken. There is plenty of room to be at odds with one another when debating whether a chicken is a chicken or not when it loses its feathers, beak and three of its toenails. Leaving that aside, for a truth is that a collection of parts is a collection of parts. In our living breathing world, we can have parts but not have a minus number of parts. If you have three chickens and a poacher steals four of them, you don’t have minus one chickens. Yet in maths these things are seemingly possible. You either have a chicken or you don’t. If that were that I would not get too exasperated, but people’s imagination can run quite wild.

We have what are called imaginary numbers. They come about from the very sorry concept of taking the square root of a negative number. The square root of four chickens is two. Fine. I can replicate that in my coop. However, I can’t take four chickens that were not there in the first place and have minus four chickens, let alone take the square root of them. What does this tell you? It reinforces the idea that we can think of things that are plain silly. Things might well be mathematically possible but what you think ought to be possible can’t be replicated in the physical world. The same applies with our vivid imaginations. There are many ideas we can have in our heads that we can’t translate into the real world.

When we don’t know the answer, we can leave the question open until we discover more. Some however, decide to use their imagination to fill in the gaps. We haven’t been able to provide a good explanation as to how the universe came into being. So, people invented something, namely a magnificent creator. The creator idea is no better than trying to take the square root of non-existent chickens and producing infinite eggs by feeding them one basket of wheat.

The universe runs solely on whole numbers. There is magic to simple integer whole numbers. Whole numbers and the properties of them enable you to exist. This is the most complex, most difficulty of all chapters. It takes you on a mini journey, explaining all and everything regarding the universe from true atoms to information and structure. There are simple reasons for why things are as they are. You will see how simple basic building blocks creates complexity. The genius is in the simplicity. A lot of people have wasted time discussing the concept of singularity - the idea of things starting from a decidedly small point and expanding rapidly. The only useful aspect to all this is the word they chose. Singularity. There is another use for that word which leads to a different understanding of the way things are. Single. Sole. Only. One. A single common true atom. A single arena of space. A single flexi-constant and only one way things can be. From one we get congregation, structure and wild complexity. Most complex structures are built with very simple basic building blocks.