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Tyrrell_McAllister comments on Why is the A-Theory of Time Attractive? - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: Tyrrell_McAllister 31 October 2014 11:11PM

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Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 03 November 2014 01:20:21PM *  1 point [-]

I do know how to characterize the affine line as a topological space without reference to the real numbers.

This is what I was referring to. The axioms of ordered geometry, especially Dedekind's axiom, give you the topology of the affine line without a distinguished 0, without distinguishing a direction as "positive", and without the additive structure.

However, in all the ways I know of to construct a structure satisfying these axioms, you first have to construct the rationals as an ordered field, and the result of course is just the reals, so I don't know of a constructive way to get at the affine line without constructing the reals with all of their additional field structure.

Comment author: JeremyHahn 04 November 2014 12:36:21AM 2 points [-]

You might be able to do it with some abstract nonsense. I think general machinery will prove that in categories such as that defined in the top answer of

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/92206/what-properties-make-0-1-a-good-candidate-for-defining-fundamental-groups

there are terminal objects. I don't have time to really think it through though.