Is it possible to have a set with -1 elements?I find Kea's blog interesting because it allows to get some grasp about very different styles of thinking of a mathematician and physicist. For mathematician it is very important that the result is obtained by a strict use of axioms and deduction rules. Physicist (at least me: I dare to count me as physicist) is a cognitive opportunist: it does not matter how the result is obtained by moving along axiomatically allowed paths or not, and the new result is often more like a discovery of a new axiom and physicist is ever-grateful for Gödel for giving justification for what sometimes admittedly degenerates to a creative hand-waving. For physicist ideas form a kind of bio-shere and the fate of the individual idea depends on its ability to survive, which is determined by its ability to become generalized, its consistency with other ideas, and ability to interact with other ideas to produce new ideas. During last days we have had a little bit of discussion inspired by the problem related to the categorification of basic number theoretical structures. I have learned from Kea that sum and product are natural operations for objects of category but that subtraction and division are problematic. I dimly realize that this relates to the fact that negative numbers and inverses of integers do not have a realization as a number of elements for any set. The naive physicist inside me asks immediately: why not go from statics to dynamics and take operations (arrows with direction) as objects: couldn't this allow to define subtraction and division? Is the problem that the axiomatization of group theory requires something which purest categorification does not give? Or aren't the numbers representable in terms of operations of finite groups not enough? In any case cyclic groups would allow to realize roots of unity as operations (Z2 would give -1). I also wonder in my own simplistic manner why the algebraic numbers might not somehow result via the representations of permutation group of infinite number of elements containing all finite groups and thus Galois groups of algebraic extensions as subgroups? Why not take the elements of this group as objects of the basic category and continue by building group algebra and hyper-finite factors of type II1 isomorphic to spinors of world of classical worlds, and...yes-yes-yes, I must stop! This discussion led me to ask what the situation is in the case of p-adic numbers. Could it be possible to represent the negative and inverse of p-adic integer, and in fact any p-adic number, as a geometric object? In other words, does a set with -1 or 1/n elements exist? If this were in some sense true for all p-adic number fields, then all this wisdom combined together might provide something analogous to the adelic representation for the norm of a rational number as product of its p-adic norms. Of course, this representation might not help to define p-adics or reals categorically but might help to understand how p-adic cognitive representations defined as subsets for rational intersections of real and p-adic space-time sheets could represent p-adic number as the number of points of p-adic fractal having infinite number of points in real sense but finite in the p-adic sense. This would also give a fundamental cognitive role for p-adic fractals as cognitive representations of numbers. 1. How to construct a set with -1 elements? The basic observation is that p-adic -1 has the representation -1=(p-1)/(1-p)=(p-1)(1+p+p2+p3..) As a real number this number is infinite or -1 but as a p-adic number the series converges and has p-adic norm equal to 1. One can also map this number to a real number by canonical identification taking the powers of p to their inverses: one obtains p in this particular case. As a matter fact, any rational with p-adic norm equal to 1 has similar power series representation. The idea would be to represent a given p-adic number as the infinite number of points (in real sense) of a p-adic fractal such that p-adic topology is natural for this fractal. This kind of fractals can be constructed in a simple manner: from this more below. This construction allows to represent any p-adic number as a fractal and code the arithmetic operations to geometric operations for these fractals. These representations - interpreted as cognitive representations defined by intersections of real and p-adic space-time sheets - are in practice approximate if real space-time sheets are assumed to have a finite size: this is due to the finite p-adic cutoff implied by this assumption and the meaning a finite resolution. One can however say that the p-adic space-time itself could by its necessarily infinite size represent the idea of given p-adic number faithfully. This representation applies also to the p-adic counterparts of algebraic numbers in case that they exist. For instance, roughly one half of p-adic numbers have square root as ordinary p-adic number and quite generally algebraic operations on p-adic numbers can give rise to p-adic numbers so that also these could have set theoretic representation. For p mod 4=1 also sqrt(-1) exists: for instance, for p=5: 22=4=-1 mod 5 guarantees this so that also imaginary unit and complex numbers would have a fractal representation. Also many transcendentals possess this kind of representation. For instance exp(xp) exists as a p-adic number if x has p-adic norm not larger than 1. log(1+xp) also. Hence a quite impressive repertoire of p-adic counterparts of real numbers would have representation as a p-adic fractal for some values of p. Adelic vision would suggest that combining these representations one might be able to represent quite a many real numbers. In the case of π I do not find any obvious p-adic representation (for instance sin(π/6)=1/2 does not help since the p-adic variant of the Taylor expansion of π/6;=arcsin(1/2) does not converge p-adically for any value of p). It might be that there are very many transcendentals not allowing fractal representation for any value of p. 2. Conditions on the fractal representations of p-adic numbers Consider now the construction of the fractal representations in terms of rational intersections of real real and p-adic space-time sheets. The question is what conditions are natural for this representation if it corresponds to a cognitive representation is realized in the rational intersection of real and p-adic space-time sheets obeying same algebraic equations.
3. Concrete representation Consider now a concrete candidate for a representation satisfying these constraints.
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