Because mathematics appears to be absolutely predictable -- and because nothing else is absolutely predictable --
practically every thinker since the conception of mathematics has attempted to apply mathematics to their thinking.
Those most successful in making use of mathematics are called scientists; those least successful, charlatans.
What do we mean by successful? Someone is successful in their thinking if they can predict events based
on their thinking. Success appears to be a qualitative word in which one can talk about success in terms of
a scale that ranges from total failure to complete success. A weatherman, thus, may be 70% successful in predicting
the weather and a chemist 99.99% successful in predicting the outcome of a simple chemical reaction (where failure is almost
always explained away in terms of slight impurities or imprecise measurements).
Any true mathematician is aware that nothing in the real world is perfectly measured by mathematics.
Even something as simple as one plus one equals two has no perfect fit on the material world.
Solipstically, one can point out that if one adds one pile of sand to another pile of sand, one does not
get two piles of sand. But this can be dismissed as a word game.
However, something that seems like a word game actually turns out not to be: Take a sweet apple and a
sour apple. What do you have when you bring them together? Two apples? Yes, in a way. But you don't
have two sweet apples and you don't have two sour apples. The apples can only be "added" by losing preciseness.
If you are baking an apple pie, a good cook will be daunted by this impreciseness. The amount of sugar needed will vary
depending on the tartness. Two apples is simply inadequate as a description. Moreover, one sweet
apple and one sour apple will not work either, because the sweet apple might weigh twice as much as the sour apple and
this too will affect how much sugar is needed.
When a scientist borrows from the world of numbers and attempts to use that world to predict an outcome, the scientist
might or might not realize that precision has been lost. There is no such thing as a perfect centimeter, a perfect hour,
a perfect kilogram -- except in the rarified universe of Plato, and then only as an Ideal, a concept clearer to Plato than
to many scientists today.
No instrument can measure beyond its own imprecision and that imprecision is immeasureable precisely itself. In
fact, in the world of mathematics, imprecision itself is an entire branch, so powerful is its implications. Any any
mathematician studying that branch can inform you that for an unknown function, imprecision is not predictable. Probability
Theory is itself a feeble attempt within the world of mathematics to gain control of the imposition of mathematics upon the
real world. This feebleness is most evident when one considers that most statements within the world of probability
read something like this: "The probability of this event is 99%; and the probability of the prior statement being true
is 95%; and the probability of the prior assertion being true is 84.6%; and ...."