If you have one $20 bill, how many dollars do you have?
If you have no $20 bills at all, how many dollars do you have?
Speaking of which, I hope Terrence lives by his maths. Because his version of 1 x 0 is telling me he perpetually owes me one of any noun I can think of.
Indeed. You can’t really “multiply” that one tangible frisbee you have in your hand, @Stoid. It just is. “Multiplying by zero” would be the effect of the act of removing the frisbee from your possession and it would just mean the set of frisbees in your possession is now zero. Not that the object ceased to be.
What we see there is part representative of a way of looking at math in general and arithmetic in particular as addressing that which is countable. Numbers and operations on numbers as meaning specific quantities of actual things . Which to be fair IS how we most often are first introduced to arithmetic in early life.
Exactly. It’s like explaining the number 0 to someone who counts their fingers to do math.
“What do you mean no fingers? Where the fuck did my fingers go?! How am I supposed to make a sandwich?!?!”