# Tagore – Einstein Conversations – Looking from a Different Perspective

## A critical Evaluation

(Image Credits: Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute)

## Looking from A Different Perspective

Opinion 1:

The existence of humans and numbers are present in separate layers of nature. In spite, a total catastrophe which happens, as the dinosaurs ceased to exist, numbers will continue to exist. The question rises who observes the observer? If someone is watching us, who is watching the observer? We get into what is called a Gödelian knot (7) and the end is infinite.

Opinion 2:

Numbers have the basic sense of counting but as stated earlier, if the observer does not exist then the sense of comprehending the reality cease to exist and hence we call it that the numbers do not exist.

When we talk of abstract mathematics like linear algebra, group theory, topology, the concept of abstraction is dependent on the observer. Abstract mathematics or abstract geometry exists only when the observer exists, otherwise not. On the other hand , ‘seven men’ will continue to exist without the observer but without the observer will lose the sense of abstraction.

Also there is a sense of order. For example, if you take the concept of homeomorphism in topology then the function $f$ and the reverse of the function $f^{_{-1}}$ is dependent on the observer. The cup turning to a donut through a function $f$ and again the reverse function $f^{_{-1}}$ also becomes true if there is a sense of direction, bijectional mapping. But ‘seven men’ is independent of any observer.

Leopold Kronecker, the famous mathematician, who framed the Kronecker product and Kronecker delta once said:

“Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk.“

(“God made the integers; all else is the work of man”)