THE RANDLE REPORT

DON’T COUNT ON IT

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality – Albert Einstein.

Mathematics is extremely useful and endlessly fascinating. In the right hands, it can predict and explain almost everything in the universe, and is the foundation of engineering, architecture, science and technology. It can even be used to dissect musical harmonies and to lend ‘scientific’ credibility to spurious statistics and correlations.

Speaking as someone who failed his maths O-level twice (or was it three times?), I came into this world as ripe for bamboozling as anyone, and bamboozled I was – we all were – from the moment we were taught to recite the one-times table (I kid you not) at Foxhole infants’ school:

‘One times one is one.’

With you so far.

‘Two times one is two.’

Ah, here is where we run into trouble. We’re back to the old problem of applied blanket nomenclature that undermines taxonomy.

We look out at the car park and see two cars. Two ones are two. But is the second car an exact duplicate of the first?

‘No. One car is blue and the other black.’

One is also a Citroën and the other a SEAT.

‘To me, a car is a car.’

Then you have a future as a statistician, or a conductor of bogus studies, but don’t go alone into a car showroom or the witness box.

‘A chair is still a chair,’ says legendary lyricist Hal David, ‘even when there’s no one sitting there.’ And, lexicographically, he is correct. Both the chair’s persistence and the metamorphosis of his house into a home occur without major structural alteration.

But the chair is not any chair or every chair. It is only a chair at all because ‘chair’ is the convenient English code for communicating its general use and characteristics to others. In reality, it is billions of tiny particles and impulses moving in an area restricted by an imposed form. None of these impulses or particles is present in another chair, and no two of them are identical in the present one.

What’s worse is that the chair that was once one is no longer the one it was, because its constituent atoms, molecules and little spinning and sparking things are never static, even in the apparent equilibrium of chairdom.

Ergo, not only is once two not really two, but once one is no longer one. You could chant, ‘Once one was one,’ but both the incantation and its uses would be limited.

So what are we left with?

‘Nothing.’

Not exactly. The old alma mater didn’t dwell on the zero end of things. ‘One times nothing is nothing.’ ‘Two times nothing is still nothing.’

‘There’s nothing in the paper; nothing on the telly.’ But the paper is never blank and the TV never silent, so these are specialised forms of nothing – the absence of something specific.

An absolute zero cannot exist as part of the material universe. If it did, guess what – schlonk, no universe!

One day, in our remedial maths class at Torquay Grammar, the harassed master was explaining a method of solving what I think were quadratic equations (I’ve never since found much call for them).

‘So we call this one zero,’ quoth he. ‘Yes, Randle?’

‘Why, sir?’

‘Why?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He pondered for a while, searching the musty corners of the magisterial cranium for inspiration, and at length resolved to let me know on Monday.

I still feel slightly guilty at the thought of him spending an entire weekend poring over mathematical tomes and scratching algebraic formulæ on the walls of his cave, but, true to his word, he came back to me at the start of the next school week, chalk spattered, an even more faraway look in his good eye, brandishing a sheaf of inscrutable foolscap, to deliver his findings.

‘We’ve always done it that way,’ he announced.

Although it hardly kept me awake at night, this conundrum continued to puzzle me for an improper fraction of my life, until it dawned on me that it’s not really zero in any absolute sense that we’re looking at – not nothing – but an absence of mathematical value – the arbitrary baseline where the positive value ceases, or runs out. You could call it ‘not-one’.

Rather than making one of the equations equal zero, you are reducing it to its starting point and, by so doing, you are able to solve the x or y of the other (if you happen to know what you’re doing).

Absolute zero is not approached. Instead we have a theoretical zero of mathematics, something of which I would be very much in favour.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository