{"id":10686,"date":"2025-03-24T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-24T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10686"},"modified":"2025-03-23T12:23:52","modified_gmt":"2025-03-23T16:23:52","slug":"fantastic-numbers-and-where-to-find-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/24\/fantastic-numbers-and-where-to-find-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Prof. Antonio Padilla is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at the University of Nottingham who has also appeared numerous times on the Numberphile Youtube series, including this incredibly popular video where he shows how the sum of all natural numbers (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + \u2026 ?) is actually -1\/12<\/a>. It\u2019s ridiculous \u2013 Padilla concedes that it looks like \u201ca bit of mathematical hocus-pocus\u201d, but the pudding is in the proof, or something, and he points out that 1) this only works if you\u2019re adding all of the natural numbers, which means you don\u2019t stop at any point, and 2) this sum appears in physics, where we don\u2019t see infinities (and if we do, it\u2019s a problem).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Padilla describes the interplay between physics and some numbers at both extremes of the mathematical scale, both the very small and the very large, in his book Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Journey to the Edge of Physics<\/em><\/a>, an intense but mostly accessible book that runs through nine distinct numbers, from zero to a googolplex to 10-120<\/sup> to infinity, and uses them to explain some key concepts or findings about the nature of everything. He waltzes through the history of math \u2013 just about every famous figure there makes an appearance at some point, which will make you realize just how many great mathematicians ended up losing their marbles \u2013 and just about always finishes up somewhere in the realm of quantum physics, whether it\u2019s things we know or things we think we know, or occasionally things we still don\u2019t know. There\u2019s even a chapter on the cosmological constant, which was in the news just this past week with the revelations that dark energy isn\u2019t as immutable as we believed<\/a>, which implies that the cosmological constant is, in fact, inconstant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Padilla is talking physics and cosmology, at either end of the scale, he\u2019s engaging and by and large easy to follow, other than perhaps near the end of the book when he\u2019s introduced the panoply of particles that populate the quantum world \u2013 all the quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons that we know or think exist \u2013 where keeping any of them straight was a bit more than I could handle. It doesn\u2019t end up mattering much to the narratives of those chapters, as Padilla\u2019s point is the relevance of the numbers in question, although I ended up a little frustrated that I didn\u2019t entirely know what was going on at some points.<\/p>\n\n\n\n