A scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory replied to my email with a curt, please don’t waste my time again. The head of the Physics Department at the University of Miami dropped Bob’s research paper like it was radioactive. He receives one of these papers each week, he said. It turns out, there is a whole community of people out there who also claim to have disproved Einstein’s theory. So persistent are these outsiders that John Baez, a Professor of Mathematics in California, felt compelled to publish the crackpot index. It’s an online quiz you can take to see if you are, by his definition, a crackpot.
I remember being taught that multiplication was all about “groups of”, so for 3x2=6, 3 groups of 2 equals 6 because you’re summing up the total number of objects in each group.
This makes sense to me, and more importantly, it’s logically consistent. For larger numbers, it’s the same thing; 54 groups of 392, when summed up, total 21,168.
But this garbage? 1x1=2? 1 group of 1 equals 2? That’s not how numbers work.