Is everything really just Ratio?

This question finds me aged 14 in school registration asking a friend whether "green" really is just green or whether it depends upon red and blue for what it is. A suprisingly profound question in retrospect, and one that I've never satisfactorily answered. My friend Tim (Tefal ;-) correctly decided looking at the rainbow on the white board that they were interdependent! 10/10 to him.

The argument devised to help the process along is this. If everything was green, would we still call it green. Could we even see "green" if it is all we had ever seen? There seems to be something unnerving about this argument. The idea that things can be, yet we can't notice them because they are uniform. What of the uniform sound that pervades the universe? If these things did "exist" then they would show up on instruments because colours and sounds are waves who by there very nature depend upon change, so bad example. It is also a slightly dubious thought experiment anyway because it posits a world of green, and tries to conclude that we then don't know it is a world of green: hence the wierd feeling.

But it points in the right direction. Maths we do know is all about ratios. The number 5 is not a thing in itself. It is 5 apples or 5 bananas. Seeing a single apple and comparing it on the scales to 5 apples gives us the number 5. You can't compare 5 apples and 5 bananas in their "fruitness" only in their "thingness" because we now say there are 5 things and 5 things.

That said Maths does take these ratios and places them in an abstract sequence. This gives us the numbers. So we are used to thinking of 5 as a place in the sequence and as a discrete number. But alone it is nothing - it has to be understood in its ratio to 1 and in its place in the sequence (the number line).

In Physics and Maths ratio is clearer and more visible. By introduction to realtivity was indeed from Physics. The deep revelatory understanding courtesy of a great book that there was no place of absolute rest in the universe. You could not, the book explined, ever hammer a nail into the space-time continuum to act as a fixed reference point to movement. All movement - in its very essence - is measured relative to some other movement. Thus begins the path to General Relativity which takes in the counter intuitive observation that the absolute that does exist is the speed of light which is constant irrespective of the velocity of the reference (the nail)!

In that revelation it occurred that it was reasonable to suppose that this was true of all things not just speed. And began the maxim "All Things are Relative". It didn't take my friends long to come up with Plato's criticism that if its true then it iself must be relative and so it can't be absolutely true. I accepted this in the end as a weakness. But now I don't.

It seems but is hard to grasp that all things really do exist in relation to all other things. That the thing is really the hole left in the universe around it. The Jewel Net of Indra as I read recently. The conditionality that all existences are subject to: only existing by virtue of the fortuitous arising of external events that give birth to each thing.

It is hard to see for the familar things around us. It is even harder to see for ourselves. But I keep trying at the door and it certainly seems looser on its hinges these days.