That's true. Interesting observation.

-J.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Owen Densmore" <[email protected]>
To: "Nicholas Thompson" <[email protected]>
Cc: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group" <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, April 26, 2009 5:13 AM
Subject: [FRIAM] The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in theNatural Sciences



I'm completely of Tegmark's ilk:
A different response, advocated by Physicist Max Tegmark (2007), is that physics is so successfully described by mathematics because the physical world is completely mathematical, isomorphic to a mathematical structure, and that we are simply uncovering this bit by bit. In this interpretation, the various approximations that constitute our current physics theories are successful because simple mathematical structures can provide good approximations of certain aspects of more complex mathematical structures. In other words, our successful theories are not mathematics approximating physics, but mathematics approximating mathematics.

    -- Owen



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