Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Negative Numbers Don't Exist

So this is something that I made up as a joke to make a couple of friends mad and they could never prove this wrong.  Their only defense has been negative numbers exist because they do.  I'm not saying they do not exist but no one has proven this wrong.  It's Dwight's law of Numbers. I want discussion on this, the only responses I have gotten are really bad excuses that they exist just because they do.

This is a bit of a stretch and I was always bad at proofing so lets don some tinfoil hats.  Negative numbers can be represented as positive values.  You never add a negative, you are just subtracting positives.  you can take the square root of a positive but you cannot take the square root of a negative number.  i is represented as the square root of -1.  i is not real.  On number lines and graphs there are negative values but in terms of distance that line is just moving left a positive amount, not right a negative amount.

Let me guess what you are thinking here: "This guy is an idiot".  All I really wanted was people to just think about it and question things but it never happens.  Negative values do not exist in nature.  We invented them to make math easier.  When you are in debt you do not have negative dollars, You owe positive dollars.  At the same time though humans invented math and I could argue positive values do not exist but  will not do that.

When it all boils down negative numbers are used in math and are an abstract concept.  They cannot be found in nature as something that could be represented as a positive.  All I am saying is they are an abstract concept in math that is not real practically.  I invite discussion and want someone to prove me wrong but I want proof and do not want people to just make claims about them existing.