Do Numbers Count?

	Book review on The Enigma of Numbers by Lance Storm Reviewed by Max Payne, 2009 published in Network Review No 100
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This is a very informative, highly readable book which sometimes invites the reader to dismiss its contents as piffle, yet on the next page raises the profoundest questions about the nature of human knowledge. From the days of Pythagoras mankind has been fascinated by the relation between number and the world of experience. The simple numerical relation between the length of a tuned string and the notes of a musical scale suggested a deep harmony between mathematics, beauty and the workings of the universe. Plato held that mathematics could reveal the ideal forms of which this world is only a shadow. Number and geometry are things that at the same time are understood from within the mind, but yet also apply to the outer world of experience and give deeper understanding of it. It would seem to follow therefore that the imaginative exploration of the meaning of number might reveal the inner  structure of reality. Music, mathematics and astronomy could perhaps combine to give a profound mystical symbolism.

This book gives a wide ranging account of the numerological ideas that have arisen in various cultures, Egyptian, Classical Greek, Chinese, and the mediaeval Kabbalah. In this it is quite a useful book of reference, but Lance Storm goes further. He thinks that numerical symbolism does not only relate to ancient myth. The unity of one, the yin and yang of two, and the Holy Trinity of the number three are not only historical symbols: in a Jungian analysis they relate to archetypal structures in the  collective unconscious.

At times the author has allowed his subject to run away with him. The history of the 20th century is interpreted in terms of the rhythm of decades. Under the heading of the ‘Forties’ it omits the 2nd world war and the founding of Red China. At this point the limit of empathetic credulity is passed, and the reader is inclined to dismiss the whole topic as nonsense. Modern science has shown that nature cannot be understood in terms of simple arithmetical relations. Yet as Lance Storm points out, the deep issue remains. The distances of the planets from the sun are not in a simple ratio as in Bode’s law, but mathematics is wider than just arithmetic, and the aesthetic urge for mathematical simplicity still dominates our search for physical understanding. The relation of mind to matter is still a puzzle. Why is it possible for us to understand the world at all? Why is it that the most abstract of mental activities can give the deepest understanding of the nature of physical things? We seek to find a ‘theory of everything’ in which one formula unites all the fundamental forces of nature, and we believe our aesthetic urge for formal simplicity will reveal the basic structure of things as they are. This seems to assume a basic holistic unity in which mind and matter are two sides of the same coin. It could be that exploring the imaginative possibilities of mind may help to reveal the inner nature of things after all.

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