Index 
Appearance and Reality Calcium Solubility Idea of "Other" Language
Max Tegmark, a PhD physicist intones: "Plato was right: modern physics has made abundantly clear that the ultimate nature of reality isn't what it seems." Page 47, last ¶, Discover Magazine, December 2013: "The bottom line is that IF you believe in an external reality independent of humans, then you MUST also believe that our physical reality is a mathematical structure. Everything in our world is purely mathematical -- including you." (my CAPITAL letters) The magazine article is abstracted from a book by Max Tegmark, 2013: Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. An online reviewer of the book at Amazon.com (Brian Green who authored a NOVA documentary I just saw about string theory, membranes, and their implications for multiple universes [oxymoron noted] and everything else) lauded: Our Mathematical Universe boldly confronts one of the deepest questions at the fertile interface of physics and philosophy: why is mathematics so spectacularly successful at describing the cosmos? Through lively writing and wonderfully accessible explanations, Max Tegmark—one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists—guides the reader to a possible answer, and reveals how, if it’s right, our understanding of reality itself would be radically altered." from "The Hidden Reality", 2011 I think these summarize the position of many current physicists, i.e. those trained in the physical sciences. This position is not expressed often, and I suspect it usually lies hidden even from most of its holders themselves. The Platonic part replaces God with "Math" or "Scientific Laws", but I don't see the distinction. I have commented at the end of several Physics classes (and others) at MCC that the lecturer seemed to imply that mathematics as embodied by the laws are the true reality, whether reality consists of fields rather than substances As Green asks in the review quoted above: Why is mathematics so spectacularly successful at describing the cosmos? To which I say, "It's not". Which leaf will fall next from the tree out my window? Math can describe nothing in particular and only the general within statistical limits, but I often hear the retort: "Not yet, but with enough data, the laws could answer your question." | But I don't now have such data, nor do I suspect anyone ever will. This argument leads to the concept that knowing the momentum of every hadron and boson in the universe (maybe more stuff too), one could from a few laws predict everything. Physicists even pursue as a holy grail the single "Theory of Everything" that will, as it says, encompass, and in science that means "explain", everything, i.e GOD. Is the "standard theory when quantum and gravity have been encompassed" then God? How devoid, it seems to me, of the variability that makes life interesting. Everything is reduced to a general "law" and particulars are merely "deviates from the mean", though, it should be noted, the mean does not exist in baryonic matter, to use a term of theirs. But, The unknown, i.e. God, always lurks in greater precision of observation, aided by technology and focused by math. Hogwash. The leaf?  In another, but related article in the same magazine, Discover, December 2013, Zeeya Merali, the author, raised the idea, as serious no less, that perhaps we are nothing but a computer simulation conducted in another one of these infinite universes that math tells us about, as Tegmark says (see above). Are we such a simulation? Yes perhaps, but I really doubt it, and I doubt I can ever know. I can think of a lot of possible universes, but many like this one are a play on the old idea that maybe the solar system is but an atom in another universe. Zeeya parahrases Nick Bostrom, It makes more sense to bet that we are delusional silicon-based artificial intelligences in one of these many forgeries, rather than carbon-based organisms in the genuine universe. Strange, very strange denial of reality as we perceive it and thus a denial of our very self, which can be no more than we perceive it to be. I developed supporting material this past week for calcuim solubility vrs temp and pH, showing at least partial compensation for increasing acidity of the oceeans due to burning carbon. The equation: CaCO3 + (CO2 + H2O) ↔ Ca+2 + (HCO3)2 |