There is something wrong with our mathematics, that it does not lend itself to describing the real world. Beyond counting, we find all the things that actually are, are curved, in description–smooth, continuous, constantly in motion within their tracks. The digital, base-ten system we are accustomed to breaks down early into any quest into the physical world: light, sound, and matter all being wave-shaped.
One wonders if our math is perhaps really more just another part of our spoken language, rather than a means for describing reality:
a way of counting pieces of space we have classified with other parts of the language into being discrete things,
its rules just more grammar;
its conclusions, newspaper wrapped tight around what really is,
around the heart of the matter,
around something we cannot name.
At least not yet.
Or perhaps even language outstrips and baffles it.
When one thinks about the waves that make up everything we encounter, one cannot help but also wonder if there is another math, perhaps less linguistic; with a different foundation and different beginnings; one that would lend itself better to the problems we have discovered. And were it one in which the equations describing an electron’s location would be simple or elegant, rather than tortured, it could perhaps even be argued to be more correct.
The first math, the beta to our VHS, was base five and twelve, and would have, given the chance, likely done a better job with some of these phenomenon than our own. We mourn its passing, if only because we wish our minds had been formed around its shapes, more beautiful than the ten-by-ten grid they did grow up in, more natural even than the number of our own fingers.