On Sat, 25 Apr 2009 21:13 -0600, "Owen Densmore" <[email protected]>
wrote:
> I'm completely of Tegmark's ilk:
I assume that means you would also adhere to the sentiment attributed to
Einstein:
"How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human
thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably
appropriate to the objects of reality?" Which contains the
fallacy, "independent of experience."
Thought - and mathematics! - is but a refined metaphor of experience.
(following Lakoff)
davew
> A different response, advocated by Physicist Max Tegmark (2007), is
> that physics is so successfully described by mathematics because the
> physical world is completely mathematical, isomorphic to a
> mathematical structure, and that we are simply uncovering this bit by
> bit. In this interpretation, the various approximations that
> constitute our current physics theories are successful because simple
> mathematical structures can provide good approximations of certain
> aspects of more complex mathematical structures. In other words, our
> successful theories are not mathematics approximating physics, but
> mathematics approximating mathematics.
>
> -- Owen
>
>
>
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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