{"id":353075,"date":"2010-02-23T09:15:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-23T14:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5587346.post-6363561630191524402"},"modified":"2010-02-23T09:15:44","modified_gmt":"2010-02-23T14:15:44","slug":"the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-mathematics-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/353075","title":{"rendered":"The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics &#8211; explained"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Eons ago my peers used to puzzle over the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dartmouth.edu\/~matc\/MathDrama\/reading\/Wigner.html\">unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics<\/a>. Back in the 1960s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dartmouth.edu\/~matc\/MathDrama\/reading\/Wigner.html\">an essay on the topic by Merci Cooper<\/a> ended with this conclusion \u2026<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u2026 The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve\u2026.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Why is it that the \u201cthe great book of the universe is written in the language of mathematics\u201d (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.lithoguru.com\/gentleman\/quotes.html\">Galileo Galilei<\/a>)?<\/p>\n<p>In a recent <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/programmes\/b00qj2nq\">In Our Time programme on Mathematics&#8217; Unintended Consequences<\/a> I heard, from one guest, a personally persuasive explanation. It\u2019s a fundamentally <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Anthropic_principle\">anthropic<\/a> explanation that goes something like this:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Entities that can do mathematics arise as a consequence of natural selection. <\/li>\n<li>Natural selection can only occur in regions of a universe that have interacting and persistent patterns (perhaps including recursion). <\/li>\n<li>So a universe containing mathematicians will also be a pattern-based universe. <\/li>\n<li>Mathematics is a process for describing and manipulating patterns. <\/li>\n<li>Therefore mathematics is a language that can describe pattern-based universes, including our own. <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>I\u2019m good with that.<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\"><img width='1' height='1' src='https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/5587346-6363561630191524402?l=notes.kateva.org' alt='' \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Eons ago my peers used to puzzle over the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Back in the 1960s an essay on the topic by Merci Cooper ended with this conclusion \u2026 \u2026 The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":711,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-353075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/711"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353075\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}