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
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whoops i meant celestial mechanics but yeah i guess orbital mechanics too maybe. and even there we have stuff like the three-body problem
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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i think part of the issue is that it's probably a hell of a lift to work out exactly how alien math would work without a bunch of fundamental stuff, but i'd love to see someone who really knows about it try
idk, so far it seems that math is a superb descriptor of the universe, and what is lacking for us to take full advantage of it are measurement errors and computing power.
each time we improve them, math seems to provide longer and more accurate predictions.
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