On 10/18/2014 3:37 PM, LizR wrote:
On 18 October 2014 09:47, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com
<mailto:johnkcl...@gmail.com>> wrote:
On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 3:42 AM, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com
<mailto: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".
I'm puzzled by that remark. If humans invented mathematics wouldn't that imply that it
would be effective? In most cases mathematical systems have been invented explicitly to
solve physical problems. And in all cases they have been invented by physical beings who
physically evolved. I can't imagine that any explanation could do better at explaining
the effectiveness of mathematics. And one certainly can't argue that it's because the
world is based on a UD computation, because that mathematics doesn't include any of
analysis, which is the "unreasonably effective" mathematics that Wigner referred to.
Brent
Once that's been sorted out convincingly, we can go back to wondering where space,
matter and so on /really /come from.
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