On 18 October 2014 09:47, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 3:42 AM, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> to math make the Big Bang or did the Big Bang make the math? I don't >>> know and I'm not going to pretend that I do. >>> >> >> > I don't see how the big bang could make 2+2=4. Are you saying that in >> another big bang, 2+2=5? >> > > No, but I am saying that maybe we should take it seriously when people say > that mathematics is a language, a language that is extremely well suited > for describing certain things and for telling certain kinds of stories. A > language can tell the story of the first 3 minutes of the Big Bang, or the > story of the construction of the Hoover Dam, or the story of the > construction of Hogwarts. One of these 3 things is not like the others > because we say it is not real, by that we mean it is not in the physical > universe; and the way we have for determining which stories in any language > tells are real is by experiment. So if mathematics really is just a > language, the most logical one conceivable but a language nevertheless, > then it's a human invention and physics is more fundamental than > mathematics and the Big Bang didn't need mathematics or any other language > but mathematics needed the Big Bang. > > Please note I'm not saying any of this is true, I'm just saying it might > be. >
Of course, and as I've agreed many times on this forum it may well be true. The gap in the reasoning is that assuming maths to be a human invention doesn't explain its "unreasonable effectiveness in the physical sciences". Once that's been sorted out convincingly, we can go back to wondering where space, matter and so on *really *come from. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
