One plus one equals two. From our best calculations this simple formula has been accurate for about thirteen and a half billion years, when a one-plus-one-equals-x universe decided on an answer. The concept was a bulletin of pure energy, a new universal order, the biggest of bangs, and a phase transition. It rippled new dimensions. It trapped little whirlpools of spacetime in plank-length sized points — perpetual motion machines folded inside-out. An infinity of tiny things birthed by the idea that there was no longer a whole but a framework defined by finite points on an infinite map; a matrix of time and space with knowable locale. Sequence gave us the timeline, like beads on a necklace or video on tape — it just kept rolling. An order of operations, unfolded like origami, revealing the knowable.
A history and a quote: “From this proposition it will follow, when arithmetical addition has been defined, 1+1=2.” It took a thousand pages and almost all of history to write down what felt so fundamental. Principia Mathematica, by Whitehead and Russell, published in three volumes, attempted to prove the more obvious axioms and to create a new notation using a set of figures — a complicated language called “propositions.” Clunky, bizarre, and an obtuse code. The authors later attempted to create a volume four but abandoned it due to “intellectual exhaustion.”
One represents the identical, the thing which is fundamental and cannot be changed. A measurement which is repeatable. An inch, a minute, exactly a pound. Conceptually, it can represent anything — informally an evening, a train ride, a lifetime. A million singles pennies or a beach worth of grains of sand, the number of stars in the milky way, now multiplied, divided, or added to themselves. A first kiss, a second, and a third; each memory categorized and longed for by a tender mind. One represents the whole, the finite, the genus, the sprawling web of enormous filaments woven together by gravity, their size unknowable and unsee-able all at once. It represents the microscopic, a Petri dish full of atom, proton, quark, wave, or string. One can be sliced in half an infinite number of times, until the impossible last cut leaves us, again, with one.
Plus is the adhesive, the ampersand, or a cross-stitch. It juxtaposes and combines. A preposition, it places next to, or above, or below, or at a later time. It almost always replaces. It binds the dimensional, the X, the Y, the Z. It sows the tapestry. With every second, it unwinds the clock and makes the trains run on time. It fastens into securely and arranges just so. It grows from the center and spills into the street, down the drains and through the pipes — seeping into the ocean. It expands the shape of the balloon with warm and wet breath; blown, perhaps, until it pops. It procreates and multiples, it super-sizes, and makes numerous. It levels up, gives a little extra, and fills the tank.
Equal, the final judgement. It’s the deposition, the verdict, and the sentence. It’s the weight of things; all things being equal. It takes the knotted and tangled mass and pulls the strings — revealing length. What’s on either side is the equation: two expressions of the expressible. An ocean now the total of waves across its surface. The twisty-turny story, one word on this side of the sign. It is the answer and shows that the different are the same, irrelevant. A message encoded, then decoded. It is the thing we have longed for, the broken howl of the disenfranchised, the force that drives us out and on to the streets, and into the moment, because we know that we are, equal. It is the equalizer, the final truth, and the quantity, size, and degree; all the same.
Logic soon followed, making each argument more algorithmic. But the greats who founded it, the genius and gifted, those who explored its frameworks, learned its rules and expressions, and finally accepted it as incomplete. Eventually, they lost their minds. Set theory with its sets of sets explained order, got to infinity, and defined nothing more than empty sets. They set the table, the stage, and the possibly that {one, one} makes something new. Then came the digital, blips on a wire, until a symphony filled the empty room via compact disc. We expanded fidelity, resolution, and the identical. “It seemed that life was so wonderful.”
All this repetition, twins of twins, so on and forever. The construction of a snowflake or the ear worm repeating. With enough time, repetition overcrowds, it makes the limits impossible, relativity true, and reality real. The equation defines the reason, makes measurements exact. And here is the curiosity, the repetition, the numbers, the information, and the conceptual equation — without it we collapse. To the emptiest of hallows or the brightest shade of white. Whichever you prefer leads to the return of the undefined, in which one plus one equals zero or infinity or anything in-between.