Mathematics

U Tech’s Granville Sewell recalls: Author’s note: To paraphrase Barbara Mandrell, I was ID when ID wasn’t cool. What, intelligent design still isn’t cool, you say? Oh…well, compared to 1985 it is. I offer for your interest the Postscript to my 1985 Springer book, Analysis of a Finite Element Method: PDE/PROTRAN. This Postscript draws an analogy between the evolution of the software described in the book (now calledPDE2D) and the evolution of life, and it is primarily about irreducible complexity, although Michael Behe would not coin that term until 11 years later. It is also clear that I was an intelligent design proponent then, though I had never heard of that term either at the time. In fact, as far Read More ›

Interesting discussion from NOVA: Zeno’s paradox is solved, but the question of whether there is a smallest unit of length hasn’t gone away. Today, some physicists think that the existence of an absolute minimum length could help avoid another kind of logical nonsense; the infinities that arise when physicists make attempts at a quantum version of Einstein’s General Relativity, that is, a theory of “quantum gravity.” When physicists attempted to calculate probabilities in the new theory, the integrals just returned infinity, a result that couldn’t be more useless. In this case, the infinities were not mistakes but demonstrably a consequence of applying the rules of quantum theory to gravity. But by positing a smallest unit of length, just like Zeno Read More ›

… that it is knowable and mathematically based. That was said better by Eugene Wigner. 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. – “The Unreasonable Effectiveness “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” in Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13, No. I (February 1960). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright © 1960 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. – Nobel Laureate physicist Eugene Wigner (1902–1995) See also: At PBS: Puzzle of mathematics is more complex than we sometimes think Astrophysicist Mario Livio: There are actually two facets to the “unreasonable effectiveness,” one that I Read More ›

Astrophysicist Mario Livio shares some thoughts: Math: Discovered, Invented, or Both? The puzzle of the power of mathematics is in fact even more complex than the above examples from electromagnetism might suggest. There are actually two facets to the “unreasonable effectiveness,” one that I call active and another that I dub passive. The active facet refers to the fact that when scientists attempt to light their way through the labyrinth of natural phenomena, they use mathematics as their torch. In other words, at least some of the laws of nature are formulated in directly applicable mathematical terms. The mathematical entities, relations, and equations used in those laws were developed for a specific application. Newton, for instance, formulated the branch of Read More ›

When writing this story, there were two traps I started falling into: The first one is, act like there is something really great about the person who notices that the universe shows evidence of design. No, that’s just normal. The Darwinists and the Christian Darwinists, paid off by Templeton for example, are earning their keep by casting doubt. But some people don’t depend on such sources. So they report facts. Lennox is one. Good to hear. But we need to get past being grateful for someone who tells the truth. Second, the event happened in Canada. I made a point of not mentioning that at first. So you won’t fall asleep behind the wheel, okay?: For the info of no Read More ›

People got unseasonably lucky  (Texas lottery div). Questions were raised here.  Someone good with numbers tried studying it a couple years back. But now this: Abstract:  Some people have all the luck. We look at the Florida Lottery records of winners of prizes worth $600 or more. Some individuals claimed large numbers of prizes. Were they lucky, or up to something? We distinguish the “plausibly lucky” from the “implausibly lucky” by solving optimization problems that take into account the particular games each gambler won, where plausibility is determined by finding the minimum expenditure so that if every Florida resident spent that much, the chance that any of them would win as often as the gambler did would still be less than one in a Read More ›