On 5/22/2014 3:23 PM, LizR wrote:
On 23 May 2014 08:57, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 5/22/2014 12:59 PM, John Clark wrote:
Why not? No physicist is going to take your theory seriously or even call
it a
theory if you can't calculate with it, if you can't get numbers out of it
so it can
be checked with observation. Why is the proton 1836 times as massive as the
electron? Why is the neutron almost the same but not quite, why is it 1842
times as
massive as the electron? Why do independent protons have a half life of an
infinite
number of minutes but independent neutrons have a half life of 10 minutes
11 seconds?
See, JKC knows why the world of physics is described by mathematics - no
other kind
of description is as explicit and predictive.
I'm still not convinced that it isn't "out there" though. Anyone who became interested
in the same mathematical problems would get the same answers, as far as I can see,
regardless of whether they are living in a universe with protons 1836 times as massive
as electrons, or one made of completely different constituents. I want a more convincing
answer for why maths kicks back than all this vague hand wavy stuff - yes it's explicit
and predictive, but why? Why does it work?
It still seems unreasonably effective to me.
Maybe it's just a difference of perspective. Einstein said, "The most incomprehensible
thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible." Given that it's comprehensible,
that it is described by mathematics seems completely unsurprising. So the unreasonable
effectiveness of mathematics just derives from there being some regularities in the
universe - not that it is completely regular or lawlike; we pass off a lot of stuff as
"randomness" or "geography". I had this argument with Vic Stenger when he was writing
"The Comprehensible Cosmos" because he wanted to say that every 'law' of physics was just
a realization of physicists insistence that their descriptions of nature must be
point-of-view invariant. And indeed it made a very nice summary of modern physics. But I
pointed out that it was a fairly flexible formula because you had to chose what variable
was to be invariant and under what transformation. So maybe the existence of such
variables and formula is "unreasonable" - or maybe it's implied by some combination of
Bruno's UD and anthropic selection.
Brent
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