| There could be a universe where "thingness" doesn't work like in ours -- e.g. where things aren't portable, or where the natural world doesn't divide easily into things. Maybe quantity wouldn't mean anything in such a universe. More concretely, there are lots of ways that the mathematics of a different universe could be so different from ours that π is at best a theoretical concept. There could be a universe where spacetime is discrete, à la Conway's Game of Life. We might even live in such a universe, but the discretization in ours is too small to probe. There could be a universe with a different distance metric, such as a L1 ("taxicab") or L∞ (max difference), so that "circles" look like squares. Or spacetime, or even "thingness" could be modulo some number p -- if p=2, then 1+1 = 0. Space could still be infinite, though -- it could have more dimensions, or it could be based on (e.g.) a complete field of characteristic p. Or the metric could be p-adic, where two numbers are close if their difference is divisible by many powers of p -- kind of like the US highway system, where highways 80 and 880 are nearby. These metrics have rules like the triangle equality: the longest two sides of a triangle are the same length. |