Is the Universe Made of Math?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-universe-made-of-math-excerpt/What's the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything? In Douglas Adams' science-fiction spoof “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”, the answer was found to be 42; the hardest part turned out to be finding the real question. I find it very appropriate that Douglas Adams joked about 42, because mathematics has played a striking role in our growing understanding of our Universe.
The Higgs Boson was predicted with the same tool as the planet Neptune and the radio wave: with mathematics. Galileo famously stated that our Universe is a “grand book” written in the language of mathematics. So why does our universe seem so mathematical, and what does it mean? In my new book “Our Mathematical Universe”, I argue that it means that our universe isn’t just described by math, but that it is math in the sense that we’re all parts of a giant mathematical object, which in turn is part of a multiverse so huge that it makes the other multiverses debated in recent years seem puny in comparison.
I haven't read the book, yet, but it's on it's way to my home. What MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark is writing about is an old, old concept that has always interested me. It's an alternative cosmology, based solely on mathematics. In my own thinking, imaginary numbers play a large role in that mathematics, as they do in fractal mathematics.
I'll read the book with great interest, but I thought some in this group would be interested in this excerpt from it that was published in Scientific American. If the idea interests you, perhaps the book would be a next step. You might also be interested in Tegmark's website at:
http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/
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This excerpt from wikipedia should clear up any confusion:
rather than the ancient/Classical rationalist idealist/mentalist schools of thought of science/mathematics that Pythagoreanism and Platonism actually are. This is detailed throughout Hockney's mathematicist The God Series,[19] which is not so much theist, as atheist, intended to cover every academic subject, and advocating replacing religion/God with Pythagorean-Platonist & Leibnizian science/mathematics.
The "mathematics-theist" God Series says that Tegmark's theory, beyond the basic hypothesis of mathematicism, isn't realistic according to Pythagorean mathematical monism expressed in Pythagoras' statement "all is number" (paraphrased by Plato, which mathematicists such as Hockney also restate as "everything is mathematics"
. Hockney states that is because with existing mathematics, and by the principle of Occam's Razor, several levels aren't needed to explain reality; one only needs mental/mathematical monism (one level, with dual aspects of mind and illusory but objective matter within mind) because every geometric and material object fully contains and can be broken down into (locations for) mathematical points. This is also the case with one object that is a major basis of modern physics: the wave, which all possible waves are all plotted point-by-point with Euler's Formula or higher-dimensional versions (as the basic formula is two-dimensional).[clarification needed] Hockney says that a mathematical point is the basis of mind (as in Leibnizian mind/monad, unit, number, or point) and because of that and the nature of Pythagoreanism, one doesn't need a quantum theory variant based on the Copenhagen Interpretation with "many worlds", not even mathematical objects (as material worlds), that he says only need to exist in the mind, but that to be true mathematicism/mentalism/Pythagoreanism or mathematical Platonism, or mathematical Leibnizianism, a single (and single-level, mental) large/infinite universe modelled by using mathematical points and waves & Euler's Formula to mathematicize the De Broglie-Bohm theory is the correct approach.[19]
But clearing up confusion? Not so much...
...instead.
Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences
Why do even well-educated people understand so little about mathematics? And what are the costs of our innumeracy? John Allen Paulos, in his celebrated bestseller first published in 1988, argues that our inability to deal rationally with very large numbers and the probabilities associated with them results in misinformed governmental policies, confused personal decisions, and an increased susceptibility to pseudoscience of all kinds. Innumeracy lets us know what we're missing, and how we can do something about it.
Sprinkling his discussion of numbers and probabilities with quirky stories and anecdotes, Paulos ranges freely over many aspects of modern life, from contested elections to sports stats, from stock scams and newspaper psychics to diet and medical claims, sex discrimination, insurance, lotteries, and drug testing. Readers of Innumeracy will be rewarded with scores of astonishing facts, a fistful of powerful ideas, and, most important, a clearer, more quantitative way of looking at their world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innumeracy_(book)
https://www.amazon.com/Innumeracy-Mathematical-Illiteracy-Its-Consequences/dp/0809058405
A great effort had gone into quantifying electrical phenomena, and Maxwell managed to assemble that work into a beautiful theory of electricity and magnetism, deriving that the theory predicted waves moving at the speed of light
Neither the speed of light, nor the constants that Maxwell (and some predecessors) had combined to yield it, were known a priori --- they had been found through hard experimental work
Moreover, Maxwell's astounding accomplishment was not only highly productive: it was also extraordinarily misleading; and experimental work intended to exploit Maxwell's ideas actually immediately encountered unexpected difficulties that toppled the worldview that had allowed Maxwell's original insights
Having a good electromagnetic theory set people searching for ways to generate and detect electromagnetic waves: the ultimate outcome was radio
At the same time, the idea "light is a wave" naturally led to a fruitless search for whatever medium the lightwave was vibrating (the so-called "luminiferous ether" .
The first crude original radio-device of Hertz encountered another weird problem. Hertz wanted to detect the electromagnetic wave generated by a spark, by producing a secondary spark in a wire loop some distance away. The method apparently worked. Inconveniently, however, the secondary spark was small and quite hard to see. The obvious solution, of course, was a darker environment. Unfortunately, and unexpectedly, darker environments produced even smaller secondary sparks. This "photoelectric effect" was real, but for many years it was difficult to obtain consistent experimental results about the phenomenon, until Millikan finally carefully built his machine shop in vacuo and used it to accumulate data over a decade
By this time, the very comfortable world of classical physics, not so long after Maxwell's triumphs, began to unravel: the Michaelson-Morley experiment cast doubt on the "luminiferous ether," which perhaps suggested light was a particle after all; and Einstein showed how that hypothesis could explain the "photoelectric effect," with Millikan's later data supporting Einstein and Einstein's predicted relation to Planck's constant. What then could be the relationship between the light particle and Maxwell's continuous wave?
What is important here is not pure mathematics, but statements in a mathematical language always being tested against the world, with the parts that really don't work being discarded. There is, as yet, no firm foundation: we have partial maps of the world, which work well in some respects, not so well in others, and a continual effort made to rework the maps so they are more consistent with each other and with the world we want to understand
