Related papers: Mathematics Is Physical
In this essay, I argue that mathematics is a natural science---just like physics, chemistry, or biology---and that this can explain the alleged "unreasonable" effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences. The main challenge for…
Being mathematics a natural language to Mankind and to physics, it must be constantly adapted to our necessities and our natural perception. Then, mathematical concepts are not absolute to reality. Although mathematical theories are…
Though the truths of logic and pure mathematics are objective and independent of any contingent facts or laws of nature, our knowledge of these truths depends entirely on our knowledge of the laws of physics. Recent progress in the quantum…
We re-examine the old question to what extent mathematics may be compared with a game. Mainly inspired by Hilbert and Wittgenstein, our answer is that mathematics is something like a rhododendron of language games, where the rules are…
Mathematics and its relation to the physical universe have been the topic of speculation since the days of Pythagoras. Several different views of the nature of mathematics have been considered: Realism - mathematics exists and is…
Analysing several characteristic mathematical models: natural and real numbers, Euclidean geometry, group theory, and set theory, I argue that a mathematical model in its final form is a junction of a set of axioms and an internal partial…
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…
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…
All sciences need and many arts apply mathematics whereas mathematics seems to be independent of all of them, but only based upon logic. This conservative concept, however, needs to be revised because, contrary to Platonic idealism…
Many have wondered how mathematics, which appears to be the result of both human creativity and human discovery, can possibly exhibit the degree of success and seemingly-universal applicability to quantifying the physical world as…
The nature of the existence, revealed through Human cognitive system, has been evolving since the development of the languages. Part of such revelations were the geometrical forms and the numbers, whose beauty and order, wondrous and…
A major question in philosophy of science involves the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics. Why should mathematics, created or discovered, with nothing empirical in mind be so perfectly suited to describe the laws of the…
The relationship between mathematics and physics has long been an area of interest and speculation. Subscribing to the recent definition by Tegmark, we present a mathematical structure involving the only division rings - the real,…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
Analogous to G\"odel's incompleteness theorems is a theorem in physics to the effect that the set of explanations of given evidence is uncountably infinite. An implication of this theorem is that contact between theory and experiment…
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…
We offer a view of mathematics as an experimental science where axioms play the role of foundational theories like general relativity and quantum mechanics in physics. Under this view, axioms are provisional and inferred from experience…
A description of physical reality in which wholeness is the foundation is discussed along with the motivation for such an attempt. As a possible mathematical framework within which a physical theory based on wholeness may be expressed,…
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…
Can mathematics help us find our way through all the wonders and mysteries of the universe? When physicists describe the laws governing the physical world, mathematics is always involved. Is this due to the fact that the universe is, at…