— a collected volume —

FiniteInfinity.

Twenty-three small books on Plato's missing substrate.

by Justin Grieshop

FiniteInfinity.

— a collected volume —

FiniteInfinity.

Twenty-three small books on Plato's missing substrate.

by Justin Grieshop

— contents —

Twenty-three small books, in order.

  1. Infinity.
    It has a shape. You can see it. It fits on one page.
  2. Three.
    What a number is, underneath the numeral.
  3. The Seam.
    Why mathematics and physics were ever thought to be separate.
  4. The Arrow.
    On Zeno, and an assumption nobody names.
  5. The Water.
    On things we have been assuming for so long we forgot we were assuming them.
  6. The Dials.
    On the numbers the universe has, and what happens when one stops being arbitrary.
  7. The Only.
    Why the four numbers are the four numbers — and could not have been any others.
  8. One Thirty-Seven.
    The number that holds atoms together, and the fraction hiding inside it.
  9. Seventy.
    On how fast the universe is flying apart, and a fight nobody has been winning.
  10. Coming Back.
    Newton showed us how to go to infinity. Now we learn how to come home.
  11. The Model.
    On the most successful theory in physics, and where its numbers come from.
  12. The Worst Prediction.
    On the cosmological constant, and what an illegal operation looks like.
  13. What Keeps Happening.
    Four integers, the constants they produce, and a quiet admission.
  14. The Inspiral.
    Two objects falling toward each other, and what a test with teeth looks like.
  15. The Tiling Fractal.
    The tile isn't just small. It is infinitely large as well.
  16. The Expansion.
    On the cosmic microwave background, and four integers read at cosmological scale.
  17. The Ground.
    What the program stands on, said plainly. It turns out to be nothing new.
  18. The Test.
    How the program keeps itself from lying to itself.
  19. The Shadows.
    On the kernels that are allowed, and the ones that are not.
  20. The Gauge.
    On the substrate before its rendering, and what you can compute by hand.
  21. The Return.
    Newton's outward journey, and the way back from a road we forgot we were on.
  22. The Line.
    What Newton's three laws actually are, seen from above the line.
  23. The Conversation.
    A conversation we have not talked about in a while.

A note on how to read this.

What follows is a series of small books. Each one is short — six or seven pages — and each one does one thing. They are meant to be read in order, but they do not require it. You can begin anywhere. The first book, Infinity, is a gentle place to start. The last book, The Conversation, is where the series quietly turns toward what all the others have been circling.

Each book can be read in about fifteen minutes. The whole volume is the work of many years. The time difference is not an accident.

The books do not argue with the reader. They show small things. They stop when the showing is done. If a book raises a question it has not answered, the next book or the one after that will usually return to it. If you want to follow a derivation all the way to the computer code that produced it, the colophon at the bottom of each book links to the public repository where every calculation lives.

That is the whole of the instruction. Turn gently.

— the volume begins —
· · ·
Marithmetics · github.com/public-arch/Marithmetics