What happens when you die? Nothing ... you just get swept up by Roomba. Farewell Hitchens. skeptics.stackexchange.com/tags/christopher-hitchens/info

@Oddthinking I've come across that.

@Sklivvz I've detagged the four questions which used "Christopher Hitchens", who you created a large tag wiki for. It's not motivated by my opinions of the person, but by the fact it was used when he was making claims, for reasons outlined in my meta post skeptics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3757/…

@PeterJohnmeyer [I've had a little bit to drink tonight, and I have a hard and fast rule not to use mod powers when I have been drinking, so please accept this as another user talking, not a mod.]

By coincidence, you turned up and asked this question immediately after some another user(s?) asked some other questions that, like you, did not have a notable claim attached.

It looked suspicious, and a user thought the questioners might all be the same person, and wondered if it was a troll. This was just bad luck - please don't take it personally.

It wasn't to do with the answer to your question.

Skeptics.SE is about finding empirical answers to questions. Your question isn't about that, so it is off-topic here.

I have seen people ask similar questions (not just here, but in Skeptics magazines) and it seems to be based on a confusion between maths and science.

Maths is, at its core, manipulating symbols according to procedures. A proof is basically showing that a sequence of symbols can be reached only by carrying out agreed procedures.

1+1=2 can't be disproved. (Either you can consider it the definition of 2, or you can prove it trivially, depending on which axioms you choose, and the Peano's Axioms are consistent so it can't be proven false and true at the same time.)

So, asking what happens if 1+1=2 in maths is largely meaningless. Arguably, if you could prove 1+1=2 is false, then you could use it to prove that everything is true, which is meaningless.

When physicists get excited about "the conservation of <energy/linear momentum/mass/angular momentum/electric charge/etc.>" it is because they have discovered through experiment and/or theory that one particular part of reality happens to follow the 1+1=2 rule. Everywhere they haven't demonstrated the conservation of a property, it is inappropriate to assume 1+1=2."

Even conservation of energy/mass, while it is a terribly useful shortcut, turned out not to be accurate with relativity. The universe didn't get thrown into chaos when it was shown that 1kg + 1kg does not necessarily = 2 kg. But a lot of theory had to be reworked.

@AndrewGrimm uh, don't worry, and actually thanks for cleaning up the tag

1+1=2 is a matter of definitions: 2 is defined as the successor of 1

either 1 has a successor, which we call 2 by definiton, or it doesn't like in boolean algebra. it's something that it's well studied

otoh, it's well known that physics (and thus all other sciences) ultimately use R, real numbers

of course in 4 or 11 dimensions (string theory does this)

what constitutes a much much more interesting question are the rules and properties of these spaces, for example: is space infinitely divisible? we don't know

all of einstein's relativity work boils down to describing the "metric" of this space: how we perceive and measure space and time based on where we are

the breaking down of conservation of mass energy is another interesting topic. As the universe expands faster than it should, it acquires energy, but at a galactic level. internally each galaxy has gravity and magnetism that don't allow matter to expand because space expands