On 20 May 2014 17:55, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > The theory is invented, the maths is discovered. > > I'd say they're both invented. How could one discover F=k/r^a out in the > world? Of course if you include your brain as a place to discover things > then there ceases to be much difference between invented and discovered. > The application was discovered. Was the mathematics of chess discovered or > invented? >
If it could be discovered independently, it was discovered. > Maths kicks back. Otherwise those prizes and fields medals and whatnot > would fall like dominoes. > > You can invent problems as well as solutions. Somebody invented the > problem of Diophantine equations as well as the problem of squaring the > circle and coloring maps and crossing the bridges a Konigsberg. > Anyone else who decided to tackle the same problems would get the same answers. > Would you like to bet that the true theory *won't *be describable by > maths? > > > You're missing my point. Every theory (and we never know whether >> they're true) in the future will be describable by maths because it's what >> we require of a scientific description: precision, logical coherence. Just >> go back and read your own emails to John Ross. >> >> I may well be missing your point, but it *looks* like you're saying > that we are inventing mathematical explanations because that's "what we > require of a scientific description". IMHO that isn't the case, because > when we use "what we require of an explanation", we end up with religion. > When we use something that can be tested, experimentally falsified and so > on -- i.e. when we look for the sort of explanation *the world* requires > -- we end up with science, and so far it appears, for whatever reason, to > operate on mathematical principles. > > Sure. But we also invent mathematics that turn out NOT to describe the > world - look at Kepler's nested Platonic solids. > So? This implies that maths is out there. Applied maths is a subset of it. > The universe exhibits symmetry, regularity and a host of other features > that it could easily not have exhibited, > > Could it have exhibited laws that were not time-translation symmetric? > Sure it could - and IT DID. But we discarded those as "geography" and > found laws for what remained...most of classical mechanics. Then Boltzman > went back and found we could use them in a statistical theory to explain > those time-asymmetric phenomena. Noether then showed that if we made up a > theory that didn't have a conserved "energy" then it wouldn't apply for > time-translation. Who wants laws that are tied to specific times and you > have use different dynamics depending on when you start? So we had a good > reason to want time-translation symmetry in something if we were going to > call it a "law". > You keep going on about applied maths, but that isn't what I think we discover. > > Physics (unlike engineering) has the luxury of looking for simpler > underlying theories and bypassing messy cases (like consciousness). But > notice that engineering is mathematical too and is full of theories with > narrow domains of application where it is assumed there are more > fundamental theories but none that we can apply - e.g. elastic theory of > metal structures. > > > and which are all amenable to mathematical description. I'm not making > any radical Brunoesque (or Tegmarkesque) claims about it, I'm just > repeating what hundreds of scientists have observed, > > > And plenty have observed that we invent mathematics to describe the > physical world too (see Vic Stenger's "Comprehensible Cosmos"). Newton > didn't invent the calculus just as a game. He invented it to have a > precise predictive way to calculate planetary motion. > It was invented independently by Leibniz. > and as far as I can see with good justification, the (fairly trivial) > observation that scientific theories are couched in the language of > mathematics because that is what works. Nothing else appears to work, and > the only sensible explanation I can see for that is that it is how the > universe operates. > > Anyway, I expect you will explain the point I am missing. > > Nothing else appears to work because nothing else is specific and coherent > and free of vague "interpretation"...and that's exactly what you've been > telling Ross is lacking in his theory. He has all these ideas about how > things work, but because he hasn't given them mathematical descriptions > they aren't specific and precise enough to directly compare them to > observations or even to tell whether they are consistent or > self-contradictory. Which is exactly what you (rightly) criticize him for. > You want a theory to be mathematical and you won't even recognize a theory > as that isn't mathematical because, having a modern education, you realize > that anything else is subject to handwaving. That's why you and I are > interested in learning modal logic from Bruno, but without his theory being > put in mathematical form it's hard to know what G* - G means, for example. > You appear to be shooting yourself in the foot but I don't have time to expand on that comment right now. -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
