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Mathematical dark matter

gleech.org · 2,369 words · saved by 1 readers

If you’re reading this, you are probably quite impressed with maths. It explains everything; The scientists are just scrabbling in the foothills of the mathematicians; It is the purest human activity, the least and most human. So maths can do anything? No. This is selection bias. i.e. it is a search over a huge space, and we don’t hear from the failures. Science as (model) selection. (Just one thing we paper over: We can’t derive masses - the Yukawa couplings are free parameters. “The ultimate reason for these couplings is not known: it would be something that a better, deeper theory should explain.”) Millwood: It was pretty far into my mathematics education that I realised: one of the reasons mathematics always seems to have all the answers was that the teachers were the ones choosing the questions. Sawyer: If a mathematician attacks a problem which is completely beyond the range of the ideas available to him, he publishes no papers and leaves no trace in mathematical history. Other m

the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics — Galileo If you’re reading this, you are probably quite impressed with maths. It explains everything; The scientists are just scrabbling in the foothills of the mathematicians; It is the purest human activity, the least and most human. This is most obvious in the success of mathematical physics, which has succeeded as nothing else has ever succeeded: Awe Predictive precision and measurement precision prediction of grav waves, size \(10^{-20} \,\mathrm{m}\); nailed it atomic mass of the electron : \(3 \times 10^{-11} \,\mathrm{kg}\qu

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