seeing more math on the TL recently. i haven't mathposted in a long time but i'm still happy to field math questions from twitter peeps, just reply here or tag me or w/e. big meaty philosophical questions like "wtf are real numbers anyway" would be particularly fun for me rn
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Why does math empirically predict/describe our universe so well? How much of this should be viewed as a statement about anthropics/minds vs "natural patterns" for structures to emerge from?
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after thinking about it for 30s i think this is kind of a meme. there's plenty of parts of the universe that are pretty poorly predicted or described by mathematics. when you want to make math sound good you single out stuff like orbital mechanics and ignore stuff like bio
whoops i meant celestial mechanics but yeah i guess orbital mechanics too maybe. and even there we have stuff like the three-body problem
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it is odd a little when people talk about communicating with aliens using mathematics when it took us ages to figure out the idea of zero and it stands to reason theres a bunch of other biggies that would differ between us and, say, sentient gas clouds from algol
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But the fact that at a basic level nature is modeled very accurately by simple, beautiful math remains a miracle. “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” We shouldn’t dismiss this; it’s like the most interesting thing about physics.
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