Oolon Colluphid

A pedant after me own heart!

DT

Ted Hoffman

The universe is autological and is self-processing ans self-configuring.

Scientific thinking is flawed due to the problem of induction in empiricism: its self-referencing.

Shadowy Man

Guilty as charged. I know better...

cfgauss

IMHO, physics comes from mathematical symmetries and other neat mathematical tricks. Of course, you could also argue that math comes from physics. Either way is cool .

Mr. Sammi

cfgauss : If physics comes from mathematical symmetries then how is this attributed to the physical world.

Arguing that math comes from physics is irrelavant to this discussion BUT may be relevant as additional information if you can demonstrate your claim.

In a philosophers view the first math came from the cognition of the physical world. 1, 2, 3 mouths to feed - must beat animal in head, all day and night to BOOT. Then if this were true and you could argue math came from physics then you would be arguing that math came from the physical world, but you claim that math came from physics, which would mean under my 1st assumption that physics is the physical world, which does not seem correct, since there is nothing in the physical world called physics. There is nothing in the physical world one can point to and say Sarah, look, physics. Thus if i can argue correctly the concept of ONE,which is the self, and the concept of TWO which is another, then math was not a mental apriori creation, but an emperical derivation from the physical world (with possible imaginative extensions).

Secondly if math came from physics OR physics came from math, then you are truly saying that these were pure mental configurations, which perhaps only matched the real world (as the rest of us are tying to do) due to chance. This may be possible but it is highly improbable and as such your two statements must be discarded as inappropriate material for a stable discussion - basically meaningless.


Sammi Na Boodie ()

wade-w

Sammi:

To a pure mathematician, mathematics is indeed nothing more than a purely mental construct, and has no necessary relation to the real world. When and if it does is accidental. As someone else posted somewhere in this forum, "To a mathematician, the world is a special case".

NumberTenOx

Mr. Sammi,

{removed}

Here is what I believe:

- The physical laws that we see today were there at the Big Bang.

- Theories about the Big Bang are still evolving. As various advances are made in understanding quantum gravity other unified theories we will most likely have a very different view of the Big Bang, possibly including my previous statement. That's science.

- Physics and mathmatics are indeed purely mental configurations. However they are both derived from and applied to the physical world. The ultimate test for physics is the correlation of predictions with experiment. The ultimate test for mathematics is self consistency based on assumptions.

Mr. Sammi

wade-w,

nothing more than a purely mental construct, but not an apriori construct. You speak of abstractions. The special case of the world seems to me to be putting the cart before the horse and neglecting the historical development of mathematics. Understandable but...


Sammi Na Boodie ()

Mr. Sammi

NumberTenOX,

First part of your post needs no addressing. That is why private messages are included in systems like this discussion board.


* * *

Second Part - OK. That is what you believe.



Sammi Na Boodie ()

cfgauss

Neither physics nor math are simply "abstractions" or constructs of humans. They exist independently of us. If we know it or not, F still equals ma, and F=ma is defined with math.

Physics, I believe, does come from math because there's so much of physics we can derive from simply math! For example, we can get many of the laws of circular motion from purely math and some definitions. We can get all of the conservation laws from various mathematical symmetries. We can get Special Relativity from math and a few postulates. Etc. That's why those theories are so strong! Relativity only rests on a small handful of postulates, the rest is concrete math, which is cool as long as we make sure to do the math right!

Also, asking if physics comes from math or if math comes from physics is most likely asking the same thing. The only difference is a philosophical one. It's like asking if factorial is a special case of the gamma function or if gamma is a generalization of factorial.