Perhaps we all need to recall something: The Iron Ring of the Canadian engineers is forged from the steel of a bridge that collapsed and cost 75 lives. That ring is intended as a warning, not a training manual. It turns out that in the real world, right or wrong answers in math do matter.
Mathematics
Scan a pumpkin, see a beautiful world of design
In case you missed it, Hallowe’en started out as the Eve of All Saints Day (November 1). The kids running down the street dressed as ghouls, the piles of tooth-rotting candy and the toilet paper in the trees… that all came later. Thank you for listening.
At Mind Matters News: Why just anything can’t happen given an infinite sum of universes
Marks: It can be shown mathematically that the infinite does not exist in reality, only in our minds. Thus an infinite number of universes cannot exist.
At Mind Matters News, some fun: Would ET intelligences understand the 1974 Arecibo Message?
In early, easily-mocked sci fi, a little green man points his raygun at an unsuspecting passerby and barks “Take me to your leader.” Fast forward: If the little green man didn’t have the technology to figure out who the leader was before landing, he certainly wouldn’t have the technology to get here.
Physicist Marcelo Gleiser: Beauty in the universe is an “illusory consequence of our human mathematics”
So what, exactly, is this “false and illusory” view of our universe? Is this short essay another veiled “correct” assault on the fact of the fine-tuning of the universe for life? There seems to be a lot of that out there these days. Orthodox science is now in a deadly conflict with facts… There can only be one outcome.
Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne speaks out on the war on math
Some of us remember when Darwinian commenters chided us for writing about the war on math and the war on science. Now that Jerry Coyne is starting to talk about it, will they start to listen?
ID theorists publish new paper in Journal of Theoretical Biology
We hope the journal isn’t intimidated by Darwin’s Outrage Machine, Inc. Just think, some people are now allowed to bring this up. And not just as an inhouse titter, followed promptly by dismissal of the question.
3X+1 is an unexpectedly weird math problem
Toward the end: “If anything it shows that all the things we can solve are miracles.”
The 3n + 1/ n/2 conjecture
Here is an example of how numbers can give us hard puzzles: The obvious point, for the naturals is that 3n + 1 converts an odd to an even and division by two pulls out an odd factor or else gets into the chain of powers of two, which has precisely one odd member, 1. Read More…
At Mind Matters News: Why animals can count but can’t do math
There is a current conflict among researchers as to whether our number sense is biological or cultural (nature or nurture). But the conflict appears to miss the point: Elaborate number sense depends on the ability to abstract. If that ability is biological, where exactly is it? If it is cultural, it is an iteration of the ability to abstract.
Sabine Hossenfelder: Is math real?
Hossenfelder: The physicists who believe in this argue that unobservable universes are real because they are in their math. But just because you have math for something doesn’t mean it’s real. You can just assume it’s real, but this is unnecessary to describe what we observe and therefore unscientific.
How do humans have a number sense?
Mathematics may well be an argument for dualism, the idea that the universe is intrinsically dual. It is both concrete and abstract, depending. Both the Chimp Chocolate Stakes and Chaitin’s Unknowable Number.
Can only math solve the mystery at the heart of the universe?
Hartnett, quoting: ““This is [a] very embarrassing thing that we don’t have a single quantum field theory we can describe in four dimensions, nonperturbatively,” said Rejzner. “It’s a hard problem, and apparently it needs more than one or two generations of mathematicians and physicists to solve it.””
L&FP 45: The Hypothetical Syllogism — a lecture
Here: This syllogism is of considerable practical importance: This raises the issue of denying the consequent, ~q. If p –> q and ~q, then as q is necessary for p, ~p. Where, p is sufficient for q, by reason of its core characteristics, the states of affairs associated with p, causal power, requirement of logic Read More…
Is there a hole at the bottom of math?
Indeed. That was the remarkable insight of Kurt Gödel (1906–1978), which destroyed formerly triumphant positivist philosophy. When you get to the bottom of the universe (if you do), it’s mostly questions, not answers.