Mathematics Rising

I’m intrigued by Max Tegmark’s conviction that the universe is, itself, a mathematical structure.  He presented his ideas, again, on February 15 at the recent annual meeting of AAAS, in a symposium called Is Beauty Truth? He said that he has just completed a book on the same topic.  I listened to the entire session [...]

Galileo is often called the father of modern science because of an insight he had about the relationship between mathematics, and what we are able to see in our world. Two of John Horgan’s recent blog posts (and the writing to which they refer) nicely demonstrate what I think is a remarkable oversight in discussions [...]

In a blog back in January, I referenced a talk given by David Deutsch in which he made the argument that, while empiricism has been the basis of science, empiricism alone is inadequate because scientific theories explain the seen in terms of the unseen. What we see, in all these cases, bears no resemblance to [...]

Julian Barbour is a theoretical physicist with a clear interest in tackling foundational issues and the errors of judgment that can lead physics theories astray.  One of these candidates for a mistaken judgment is time itself, and in 1999  Barbour authored the book The End of Time published by the Oxford University Press. He wrote [...]

Leibniz disassociated ‘substance’ from ‘material’ and reasoned that the world was not fundamentally built from material.  His is not simple or familiar reasoning but it was clear to Leibniz that for a substance to be real, it had to be indivisible and since matter was infinitely divisible, the true nature of reality could not be [...]

In general, I tend to resist talking about the thing that everyone is talking about, but I find reason to make an exception today.  I do want to say something about yesterday’s announcement from physicists at the LHC that they saw the Higgs particle.  Frank Wilczek describes the significance of this observation (particularly nicely) in [...]

Given the arrival of the summer solstice and this post on the EarthSky website, I decided to write a little bit about what prehistoric monuments (like Stonehenge) suggest to me about some of the roots of mathematics. With a photograph to support the claim, the EarthSky post tells us: If you stood inside the Stonehenge [...]

It seems that quite a number of categorical remarks got thrown around by Lawrence Krauss – about philosophers, theologians and physicists – in the discussions surrounding his recent book A Universe From Nothing. But, as is often the case, these kinds of categorical judgments, that question the value of very different kinds of work, do [...]

Unfortunately for us, philosophies of science and mathematics are rarely brought to the attention of individuals who are not engaged in these efforts.  Yet, while difficult to access, the views of the world provided by mathematics and science are pregnant with meaningful implications for all of us.   I have always been struck by the depth [...]

In another blogging heads interview (and in a related blog), John Horgan explores with David Rothenberg the significance of beauty in scientific thinking.  Rothenberg’s new book Survival of the Beautiful, is the subject of much of their discussion.  While the conversation centers on questions of beauty (how biology does or does not take it into [...]