From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun May 25 2003 - 11:56:40 MDT
Considerable attention has been focused on Wigner's famous essay
"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences"
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
It seems to me that we should look at this from a different point of
view, namely, instead of being about mathematics, it's more a statement
about ourselves. In other words, how little different could our
universe be so that no one like Wigner would make such an observation?
Perhaps St. Thomas Aquinas, had he lived longer or was slightly
less devout, might have written an essay on "The Unreasonable
Ineffectiveness of Prayer".
Surely when Wigner and others are astounded by the relevance of
mathematics to our investigations, it simply means that we would
be less surprised if math was less relevant, so let's assume for
a moment that we lived in such a world (and in the multiverse,
surely somewhere we do, although with perhaps low measure). In
other words, the last six or seven centuries since St. Thomas
would have unfolded in less astonishing ways, and precisely as
many people would be amazed by the ineffectiveness of
mathematics as would be amazed by its effectiveness.
Perhaps all this means nothing more than that the forces which
shaped us evolutionarily weren't very mathematical?
Lee
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun May 25 2003 - 12:07:33 MDT