The Official Uncertain Principles Cosmic Jackpot Giveaway Contest was even more popular than I expected, with 122 comments (at the time of this writing) each trying to pick the “best” number.
As promised, the winner will be announced today, but this really comes down to deciding which number is the best. So, what’s the best number?
The “best” number should obviously be something with intrinsic fundamental importance. Numbers like 7 and 37 and 206 (I liked that entry a lot) are interesting, but not all that fundamental. Constants of nature like h, c, or even the fine-structure constant alpha are important for physics, but not important as numbers.
The requirement of fundamental importance cuts the list down to five candidates: 0, 1, e, i, and π They each have their merits:
- π is, of course, the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter, and is critically important for geometry.
- i is the square root of negative one, and the basis for the entire field of complex numbers, which makes it possible to do a vast range of calculations that are impossible with real numbers alone.
- e is Euler’s number, a number that is critical for all sorts of calculus and differential equations. The function ex is its own derivative, and its the basis for the natural logarithms.
- 1 is the multiplicative identity, any number multiplied by one is itself, any number divided by itself is one.
These are all worthy candidates, but ultimately, the best number is:
0 (zero).
Obviously, zero has a bunch of very nice properties. You can add zero to anything, and it doesn’t change the original number. More importantly, you can multiply any number by zero, and you get zero, and zero divided by anything is also zero.
In the end, though, the reason it’s the best number is that roughly 50% of the effort expended on physics problems is spent trying to get things to equal zero– cross terms in quantum probabilities, decoherence rates due to external interactions, vacuum energy contributions. We love zero in physics, and theorists get very cranky when things are almost but not quite zero– see, for example, the cosmological constant.
For those reasons, the winning number in the pick-a-number contest is zero, and the winner of the contest is mollishka, at comment #6. Send me an email (orzelc at steelypips dot org) with a shipping address, and which version of the book you’d prefer (the paperback proof copy, or the final hardcover version), and I’ll send you a copy of The Cosmic Jackpot.
Many thanks to everyone who entered. This was fun.