Related papers: How not to factor a miracle

Mathematics is one of the ways our species makes sense of this world and I believe that it is inherent in our thinking machinery. The mathematics we do in turn is dependent on the way we view our universe and ourselves. Lakoff and Nunez…

The comments relate to the often overlooked, if not in fact intentionally disregarded depths of what the so called internal aspects of mathematical knowledge may involve, depths concerning among others issues such as its unreasonable…

There is no mysterious link between mathematics and physics, because both of them are human inventions designed to study the world.

Since ancient times, mathematics has proven unreasonably effective in its description of physical phenomena. As humankind enters a period of advancement where the completion of the much coveted theory of quantum gravity is at hand, there is…

We claim that human mathematics is only a limited part of the consequences of the chosen basic axioms. Properly human mathematics varies with time but appears to have universal features which we try to analyze. In particular the functioning…

Natural philosophy integrates scientific observation with abstract frameworks, often using a mathematical Ansatz to hypothesise about physical phenomena. Exploring the possibility of other universes, however, challenges assumptions that…

Most physics theories are deterministic, with the notable exception of quantum mechanics which, however, comes plagued by the so-called measurement problem. This state of affairs might well be due to the inability of standard mathematics to…

Many physicists, following Einstein, believe that the ultimate aim of theoretical physics is to find a unified theory of all interactions which would not depend on any free dimensionless constant, i.e., a dimensionless constant that is only…

We report on a pedagogical experiment to make mathematics easy by changing its philosophy. The Western philosophy of math originated in religious beliefs about mathesis, cursed by the church. Later, mathematics was "reinterpreted", in a…

Many years ago Weinberg formulated a definition of ``naturalness'' for effective theories: if an effective theory is to make sense, coefficients must not change too much when the cutoff scale is changed by a factor of order 1. As an…

As David Berlinski writes (1997), the existence and nature of mathematics is a more compelling and far deeper problem than any of the problems raised by mathematics itself. Here we analyze the essence of mathematics making the main emphasis…

Arising out of an attempt at a new foundations of mathematics, in which relations are more primitive than sets, and out of the theoretical physicists' concept of underlying causes of empirical phenomena, the idea of a purely mathematical…

Contrary to claims about the irrelevance of philosophy for science, I argue that philosophy has had, and still has, far more influence on physics than is commonly assumed. I maintain that the current anti-philosophical ideology has had…

Mathematics is an essential element of physics problem solving, but experts often fail to appreciate exactly how they use it. Math may be the language of science, but math-in-physics is a distinct dialect of that language. Physicists tend…

Several examples are used to illustrate how we deal cavalierly with infinities and unphysical systems in physics. Upon examining these examples in the context of infinities from Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers, the only known…

The human mind is endowed with innate primordial perceptions such as space, distance, motion, change, flow of time, matter. The field of cognitive science argues that the abstract concepts of mathematics are not Platonic, but are built in…

More than a speculative technology, quantum computing seems to challenge our most basic intuitions about how the physical world should behave. In this thesis I show that, while some intuitions from classical computer science must be…

Laymen and sometimes even physicists think of natural sciences, in particular of theoretical and mathematical physics often as subjects, which unfold according to an intrinsic logical pattern, with the limitations being set only by the…

The example of the calculus is used to explain how simple, practical math was made enormously complex by imposing on it the Western religiously-colored notion of mathematics as "perfect". We describe a pedagogical experiment to make math…

Math is widely considered as a powerful tool and its strong appeal depends on the high level of abstraction it allows in modelling a huge number of heterogeneous phenomena and problems, spanning from the static of buildings to the flight of…