[Math] Example of Tetration in Natural Phenomena

hyperoperationphysicstetration

Tetration is a natural extension of the concept of addition, multiplication, and exponentiation.

It is quite obvious that there are things in the physics world which can be modeled by these 3 lowest hyper-operations, as they are called.

For example:

  • Adding the forces on an object to find the resultant force.
  • Multiplying the length, width, and height of a box to find the volume.
  • Using exponentials to describe the decay of radioactive atoms.

But are there any phenomena in the natural world which are simply modeled by an equation involving tetration, some higher order hyper operation, or their inverses (such as the super-root or super-logarithm for tetration)?

And if not then why do natural phenomena only seem to behave in ways which can be modeled by hyper operations of order 3 or lower?

Best Answer

Tetration is a natural extension only of the integer-valued notions of addition, multiplication, etc.

For example, the notion that multiplication is repeated addition fails when you start multiplying by non-integers, and even if you hack together an explanation for the rationals, it requires even more care for the irrationals. The same is also true for exponentiation.

Most things that use these three operations in the physical world involve real-valued operations. For example, your power-law for a fluid viscosity might be $v^{2.4}$, or pressure is related to the inverse of the area, and so forth. Obviously, $e^t$ and its variants appears all the time.

Tetration, however, does not have a unified definition for real or complex heights. As such, its application to our physical domain is quite limited only to areas where things are always integers. And in physics, that happens quite rarely.


Edit: That's not to say that there couldn't in principle be something that is a real number tetrated to an integer height. But -- and there's always a but -- we have to account for units. If you take a length measurement and raise it to the 3rd power, it becomes length-cubed. If you take a length measurement and tetrate it to the 3rd, then it becomes...???

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