I want to show in this post that the natural logarithm is not natural – it is not a characteristic of objective nature.
The natural logarithm pops up everywhere in science: biology, sociology, economics… and the list goes on. Every student of physics knows that many of the calculations in physics (for example in electrodynamics and quantum mechanics) would be undoable if it weren’t for the natural logarithm. The universal applicability of the natural logarithm suggests that it is something that exists in the world in which we live; that it is a characteristic of the physical world. We will see, however, that the naturalness of the natural logarithm (having base ) is a characteristic of the definition of derivative – and of any logarithm to which this definition can be applied.
Wherever there’s derivation, there’s
The natural logarithm is a logarithm with as its base the mathematical constant . is a number such that the function for every has a value that is equal to its rate of growth . The existence of a number with that characteristic follows logically from our definition of derivative.
The derivative of a function is defined as follows:
In mathematics all exponential functions are of the form Therefore, if is an exponential function then the following holds:
We can move outside the limit so that the limit no longer depends on the variable (and it is therefore a constant in ):
Let’s take a closer look at the latter limit. In it there are the two functions and . We may calculate the value of the limit with the help of l’Hôpital’s rule: by determining the derivatives of and and computing . Determining is easy; . The value of is less straightforward, because it depends on the value of . If in has the value then (in the figure you can see that for and have both the same value and the same slope; and also have the same value). Returning with our findings about this limit to the equation for we see that the only exponential function for which is the exponential with base ; only if .
Every exponential can be expressed as a natural exponential
Consider again the general form of the exponential function, . There are two ways in which we can transform any function of the form into a natural exponential function.
- Firstly, we can choose a suitable variable transformation (, where ) so that we may write as .
- Alternatively, if we don’t want to adjust the variable, we may rewrite as (for ) and then let merge with into some other constant so that we end up with
Suppose for example that a biologist, let’s call her Fleur, studies a colony of bacteria in a Petri dish. Fleur finds that the number of bacteria in the Petri dish grows exponentially with a linear increase in time. Say she counts the time, , in seconds and formulates the function to describe the number of bacteria. If then n(t) is cumbersome to work with mathematically. If Fleur could rewrite in terms of a natural logarithm then any differential equation with in it would become much easier to solve.
Suppose Fleur indeed wants to rewrite in terms of a natural logarithm. She has measured the number of bacteria at and found it to be . It would be a bad idea for Fleur to use the second method (2) of naturalising because that would change and then would conflict with her initial measument. Fleur, being the clever biologist that she is, realises that and therefore opts for method (1). Suppose that she sees that doubles every 2.5 seconds. Then she might try substituting the variable for a variable for which each unit-step is not 1 second but 2.5 seconds (). The function can now be rewritten into a function which has a natural exponential form: . This will make Fleur’s life much easier.
Now we may ask the question whether the natural exponential growth-rate is a characteristic of the system that is studied or a characteristic of the way we describe that system. The facts that is a characteristic of the definition of derivative and that any exponential function can be written as a natural exponential might suggest that is a characteristic of our number system and not of nature. Suc