He was thus a purely scientistic scientist, ignoring or dismissing anything about life and the world that was not accessible to scientific method. Two issues in particular come up in the course of the Gribbins' book that merit special discussion here. This is an excellent example of the Sin of Gallileo , that the math is the real thing and that if the math works, then we understand what is going on. Feynman, who was probably a realist but not a true Platonist, probably did agree with the Gribbins and with Sandage that the reality is represented in the equations, which are the stuff of things, just as Keane Reeves sees objects consisting of the computer code of The Matrix . All of mathematics, however, is in fact an artifact of concepts.
Universals make numbers possible.
We need numbers, and numbers are meaningful, only when there are different individuals of the same kind. If there was only one dog, like one Colossus of Rhodes, we would never need to number dogs. That there is more than one means not only that we can number them, but that we can order them. Thus, if there are five dogs in my neighbor's yard, and the gate is opened, one of them will be the first out the gate, another the second, and so forth. Similarly, there have been 42 Presidents of the United States , and they can be uniquely identified by their order, with George Washington as the 1st, Abraham Lincoln as the 16th, etc.