I’m thinking that the number we call one is so basic and intrinsic to everything that we haven’t really considered that it might not be mundane. It could be the key to everything!
I began thinking about this when I saw a mention of the square root of minus one being impossible, and thinking about how meaningful to life and the universe are irrational numbers like phi and pi.
It is the weird and mysterious numbers that make everything tick, and one is a weird number. It is the only number aside from zero which is the same as its primes.
The primes of 1.00001 and 0.999999 are different from the numbers themselves. But not one, not a pure one. We can approach one by being very, very close to being one, say to a gazllion decimal places, but they still behave like regular numbers. Pure one does not.
It feels like it has the same qualities as infinity, which we can also get close to and it will act normally, but actual infinity is special and different.
Infinity appears at either end of the list of numbers, it can be infinitely small, beyond 0.0000000001 and infinitely big, like 210000000. And it is part of phi and pi which are infinite in their decimal places. And it is in the number one, a black hole that acts like infinity.
Phi and pi are almost the opposite of infinity, because their functions become more accurate with the precision gained from their longer versions with more decimal places. Infinity brings perfection.
One might also be related to how quantum mechanics works. Spooky action at a distance applies to singular things that are in an entangled pair. Not groups of things, not parts of things.
Experiments have been made in recent times to see if “macroscopic quantum entanglement” can happen, instead of just sub-atomic particles. And the answer is yes, with a test made on ” two tiny aluminum drums one-fifth the width of a human hair”.
I reckon entanglement can happen for anything that is what nature considers a one, and it will be interesting what future experiments find out.
Zeno’s arrow paradox is about how small time can get. When something is moving, technically it is a sequence of locations where it is stationary, one after the other. Right down to planck scale. Which is the one of time. You cannot have half a planck time. It too, feels like infinity, the insane idea that something cannot be halved.
As I thought about all of this I looked at an empty chair and how for an hour it did not change, it has no movement, no “life”. But of course if I observe it long enough, once upon a time it was not in that spot, and earlier still it was not made or was being made. With time it will break or decay, and in miniscule ways it is doing both, constantly, right down to planck time. Nothing is ever still except when measured the planck way.
A one thing is something we decide by how we can pick it up and it stays as one unit, and how we can separate it from other units the same as it. A drop of water is a one, as is a cat or a chair or an egg. I can’t think of anything that is half of one that is as useful as the whole. If it is, then really there were two.
We know that numerous physical processes bond atoms together to make one thing like a piece of wood. But these forces are not random, otherwise the entire universe would be one solid lump. There is more to it, there is purpose behind the making of a thing, an object, a one.
Everything is moving, right down to subatomic particles, all the time. Regardless of whether humans can notice. Every single component of the entire universe is alive. There is not a single inert thing in the entirety of existence. A photon cannot stay still.
Although, there is the Quantum Zeno Effect where if you observe a sub-atomic particle repeatedly at a fast enough rate, all probability ends and it stays in one position. This might be a substantial key to life, the universe and everything.
As someone approaches the speed of light, their experience of time slows down towards infinitely slow. To the point where nothing changes and a oneness is happening.