Essays on the real line? Are there any essays on real numbers (in general?).
Specifically I want to learn more about:


*

*The history of (the system of) numbers;

*their philosophical significance through history;

*any good essays on their use in physics and the problems of modeling a 'physical' line.
Cheers.
I left this vague as google only supplied Dedekind theory of numbers which was quite interesting but not really what I was hoping for.

You might try consulting The World of Mathematics, edited by James R. Newman. This is a four-volume compendium of articles on various topics in mathematics. It was published in 1956 so is not exactly cutting-edge, but then again, neither is our understanding of the construction of the real numbers. It contains an essay by Dedekind himself, which is just part of a section of articles on the number concept. 
There is also a book simply called Number by Tobias Dantzig that is a classic history of the number system. 
