For some weeks now, an underlying persistent debate on the reality of numbers has emerged in several discussion threads at UD. In part, it has been cast in terms of nominalism vs platonic realism; the latter being the effective view of most working mathematicians. Obviously, this is a first principles issue and is worth focussed […]
Mathematics
Robert J. Marks: Things Exist That Are Unknowable
The mathematically provable idea that something exists but is unknowable has clear philosophical and theological implications.
Robert J. Marks: The mathematics underlying our world is fascinating and full of surprises
He offers some here: When I teach a course, I too like to sell the sizzle at the beginning of each lecture. For a graduate course in information theory I teach, the students are told that they will learn why their cell phones use recently discovered coding that pushes the boundaries of what is mathematically […]
Logic and First Principles, 13: The challenge of creeping scientism (and of linked nominalism)
There is a creeping scientism in our intellectual climate. We have been led to think that Science is the gold standard of reliable, substantial knowledge and that institutional science and its leaders are the curators of knowledge. This is of course deeply connected to the wider domination of evolutionary materialistic scientism, which compounds the above […]
A new approach to probability?
Hmmm. “Thinking” is a risky strategy suggestion in a world where consciousness is supposed to be an illusion or else a material thing —unless, of course, your coffee mug has it too.
Physicist: It’s not the answers we lack, it’s the question
Arkani-Hamed: “We’re not building a machine that calculates answers, he says; instead, we’re discovering questions. Nature’s shape-shifting laws seem to be the answer to an unknown mathematical question.”
Jerry Coyne on how mathematician John Lennox embarrasses himself
We recommend you listen to the podcast, watch the video, and ignore Jerry. In fairness, he has got at least as far as realizing that anti-Semitism is a problem among the raging Woke. We can’t ask for more than that just now. It’s hard for a Darwinian to understand a mathematician anyway. We’ve seen it a few times before. Something about things adding up.
Remembering quasicrystals as formerly an object of ridicule
It’s conventional to recall a famous person putting down an idea that turns out later to be correct. In reality, the majority of putdowns come from people who would never have an original idea themselves, who are frightened by the concept in principle.
What’s Gunter Bechly doing these days?
What the Darwinians should do is write the hit review for Science now, in advance of seeing any data, accuse the researchers of not co-operating, and then say they justwnat to be friends. Increasingly, that’s what they’ve got to work with.
Hearing, the cochlea, the frequency domain and Fourier’s series
In recent weeks, we have seen repeated attempts to suggest that Mathematics is essentially a mind game we make up as an aspect of culture. There has been a very strong resistance to the idea that there are intelligible manifestations of structure and quantity embedded in the fabric of the world (and indeed in that […]
The Fourier series & rotating vectors in action (with i lurking) — more on the mathematical fabric of reality
The Fourier series is a powerful technique that can be used to break down any repeating waveform into sinusoidal components, based on integer number harmonics of a fundamental frequency: Video: This is already amazing, that by summing up harmonically related sinusoids (with suitable amplitudes and lagging) we can analyse any repeating waveform as a sum […]
Simple demonstrations of how structure and quantity are embedded in the world
As there seems to be resistance to the point that the world embeds structure and quantity (thus, mathematical features) I think it is useful to provide some simple reminders. The Egyptian rope trick and the 3-4-5 Pythagorean triplet, thus a right angle forced through a numerical relationship (and note the power of the number twelve […]
Two plus two equals five is not good theology in a rational universe
Some of us try not to wade into theology as such very much for the same reasons as we try to avoid taking a whack at the tarbaby. Where theology is directly relevant – for example if someone claims that there is an “artistic license to lie” about traditional religious ideas about the universe, well, […]
Logic & First Principles 8: Bridging the Wigner MATH-PHYSICS GAP (with help from phase/ configuration/ state space)
In order to conceptually bridge the Wigner MATH-PHYSICS GAP, it is helpful to see how deeply embedded quantitative and structural properties are in the physical world. The phase space approach is helpful, and a vid on how colliding blocks compute digits of pi (under ideal circumstances) will help. The vid: It helps to look at […]
Eugene Wigner’s treasonous claim: God and mathematics are related
Wigner’s essay was viewed as a sort of “treason” against science, meaning that his thinking did not lead in a naturalist (nature is all there is) direction. Naturalism is often called “materialism.”