"'...Anglic language, Arabic numerals, metric units, whatever else kind of ics is useful...'"
-Poul Anderson, "Lodestar" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 631-680 AT pp. 669-670.
People are likely to continue to measure metrically and to use Arabic (not Roman) numerals although, in another timeline, the Time Patrol uses post-Arabic numerals.
"Lodestar" is about two kinds of "ics," astrophysics and economics:
possible effects of a supernova;
inequalities in an interstellar economy.
Anderson ingeniously combines these two apparently unrelated issues:
for the physics, see here;
for the economics, see here.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And we do see Technic Civilization still using Hindu/Arabic numbers and the metric system. I have wondered what NON Hindu/Arabic numbers would LOOK like. And if non human ration races exist, they too would have numbers which are not likely to look like ours.
Sean
All symbol-sets are arbitrary to a degree; many cultures used letters to designate numbers (the Roman numerals) or stroke-marks -- we still do, sometimes, as a reckoning tool (four vertical marks and then a crossmark for groups of five).
The Babylonians had something roughly analogous to the positional system (which requires a symbol for "nothing") but it switched between base-ten and base-sixty at 60, and was otherwise not quite as handy and rather harder to learn.
That's why we use multiples or fractions of 12 and 60 for measurements of time, by the way -- they're ancient Egyptian (duodecimal, base-12) and Babylonian (sexagesimal, base-60).
Ancient Greek mathematics was extremely sophisticated, but it was derived from geometry rather than arithmetic.
Incidentally, Archimedes of Syracuse, the great mathematician and engineer, seems to have invented calculus or come very close to it 2000 years before Newton, sort of as an offhand thought-experiment, as revealed by a recently-discovered lost text of his work.
He did it by using geometric proofs, using line-drawing approximations, though. Greek didn't have the symbolic vocabulary necessary to do it algebraically, but Archimedes was coming at it as a method of calculating the volumes of objects with curved surfaces, which is the same way Newton and Leibniz did.
I somehow missed out on calculus at school but realize that I am basically referring to it when I discuss time and "time travel." Someone told me that we are traveling through time at the rate of sixty seconds per minute. No, we are not. A rate needs two sets of units, e.g., mph, whereas 60 seconds = 1 minute.
Nor do I travel at the rate of twelve inches per foot from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head. Instead, I extend through space, endure through time and move through space over time. This may seem obvious but it is necessary to clarify such issues, e.g., when discussing THE TIME MACHINE.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Very interesting, these comments of yours. One conclusion I drew is that what we call "arithmetic" may not have been truly practical till the adoption of Hindu/Arabic numbers.
And I have seen speculations by various writers that one means of humans and non humans learning to understand each other would be by means of arithmetic. Some kind of arbitrary symbol would be used: such a I * I = II. That is 1 + 1 = 2.
Sean
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