MU-10: Going Overboard with the Maths?

I’ve written many blogs on the mathematical universe. This one looks at a slightly different angle. Has “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in describing the universe (as Eugene Wigner put it) caused us to go overboard to a point where we believe whatever the maths says, even if current technology doesn’t allow for checking the predictions of the maths (equations)?

String theory is the poster child for my question. It started off with a perfectly sensible problem, as Brian Greene wrote in The Fabric of the Cosmos:
“When the equations of general relativity commingle with those of quantum mechanics, the result is disastrous.”
Here “disastrous” means that the equations lead to nonsensical answers like infinity and probabilities greater than 100%. Surely the maths describing our universe cannot be inconsistent with itself, cannot lead to nonsensical answers?

String theory does produce meaningful answers to some of those nonsensical scenarios. As Brian Greene wrote in his other book, The Hidden Reality:
“There’s a growing list of situations that would have left Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Wheeler and Feynman saying, “We just don’t know what’s going on”, and yet for which string theory gives a complete and consistent description.”

But string theory also predicts a lot of weird things. Sure, so too do the other theories of physics. But at least those theories can and have been tested. String theory, on the other hand, has few predictions beyond those already called out by existing theories that can be tested yet. The technological capabilities to conduct those experiments are so far in the future that it leads one to ask: why should we even consider this theory as a candidate worth taking seriously just yet?

After all, the only criteria it seems to pass is that it doesn’t produce nonsensical mathematical answers to many (but not all) scenarios, unlike the other theories. But aren’t verifiability and falsifiability the true criteria to “pick” a theory? Why should mathematical elegance and consistency even be relevant? Hence, my original question: are we going overboard in going with the maths?

But if we decide to go with the existing, proven theories, as the “correct” theories of the universe we live in, does it answer my earlier blog in this series as to whether we live in a simulated universe. Perhaps the nonsensical answers our current proven theories throw up when mixed together are evidence of a bug(s) in the Matrix…

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarJuly 22, 2017 at 8:07 AM

    The blog says: hence, my original question: are we going overboard in going with the maths? It is not only a 'original' question but a profound one too. This subject has interested me for a long time now, and I would like to share my view thus:

    In olden times human beings, as subjects, tried to understand the world as object. Their understanding was subjective naturally, and beyond that it lacked rationality often and suffered from lack of data too. Then came an age when science knowledge grew with instruments to fathom better and deeper into the mysteries of nature. What got observed needed sophisticated and complex ways to grasp; for physics that way became mathematics. Things looks comfortable because the fact gathering was more precise, minute and intense while understanding seemed to improve drastically.

    Finally man acquired such technologies that pushed him several layers away from what he can make sense out of his own contact with nature. Technologies went into many layers of inferential tracking. Technology itself got beyond the grasp of most people and how it all got arrived at was the thing that only experts can handle. In the mean time mathematics was getting out of hand. Observations were getting more and more baffling and weird. Not understandable any more. Mathematics dealt with that and produces a matching fit. "But what is the real meaning of it all - in terms of human understandability" is no longer a million dollar question; it is already several trillion dollars question! No answer anywhere in the horizon.

    I keep wondering< "Is Mother Nature just posing only a simple philosophical question to us? And that is: you want to have objective knowledge. How can you have objective knowledge as long as you are a subject. You can never, never have anything other than subjective knowledge, no matter how much you try and no matter how sophisticated your technologies and how immensely complicate your mathematics can deal with truth."

    We are stubbornly resisting the truth, "We cannot know". And that we are doing after centuries after Copernicus, the scientist, made it clear that we have to leave our ego-centric world and some nature-centric reality.

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