Hmmm; “star stuff” eh? Or something a bit more … intestinally based?
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@chenille, I think that very few folks really understand just how much we have no idea what goes past the event horizon. All our current theories just kinda 
“weird shit in there” or “here there be dragons.” There is a whole lot of new physics that needs to be discovered before we even catch a glimmer.
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It’s quite possible that space itself, never mind position, is itself an artifact of particle interaction to begin with, which boils down to ‘simple’ arithmetic. 
Cole Fury’s stuff is heady, in this talk she gives us her “best guess” as to “What is the universe made of? How does it work?” (answer: “It’s all math”.) I freely admit I don’t get it, but it uses some things that are right on the edge of stuff I deal with, so it intrigues me.
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Maybe more it’s all described by math?
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It is my considered option that our universe is something that a bored teenager in some higher dimension cobbled together at the last minute for their school’s science fair.
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When it was math people could easily visualize, people talked about the math as describing those visualizations, and now that it’s all tensors and Fock spaces, people talk about math as the underlying reality. But who knows, maybe someday we’ll get better at visualizing it again. 
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Did they finally find the math particle?
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One of the ways I’ve heard it said is that god rested for six days and pulled an all nighter on the seventh.
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If math itself generates the universe which we want to describe, with terms such as “space” and “time”, but those ideas don’t exist outside of the math because they arise from the math itself, then how do we separate the math from the particles which exist only because they do the math?
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You might be able to use maths to describe the universe. Doesn’t mean you don’t need other fields to help us understand the universe and our place in it. 
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Saying people don’t matter, because maths is not particularly helpful dude. WE do exist and while math is a useful tool for understanding doesn’t make everything we do insignificant or pointless. It’s a bit insulting to say that… I get that the universe is big, vast, etc… But WE’RE still here and have to make the best of the time we have. That MATTERS and I’m frankly sick of being told it doesn’t. YOU might not give a shit if me and mine live or die, but sure as fuck do.
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Well not everyone does. I find it really fucking dismissive of my entire working life. But hey, I’m just some dumb failed academic, so what the fuck do I know…
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Speaking as a Black woman surviving in America:
My “place” is NOT what what I made it; it was entrenched long before I was ever even conceived.
If math and science were all that mattered, the world would NOT be in its’ current state of decline.
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To some extent I don’t think the distinction is a meaningful one. Our conception of reality has always been a model. Our minds don’t encounter persistent objects – they get fed little flashes of light and sensations from our fingertips, and invented the idea of objects to explain them. Math is really just modeling in a rigorous way. I’m not sure what the difference between a universe of math and not of math would be.
That said…do you know how quantum field theory actually works? It’s not like spacetime where some relatively simple abstraction turns out to beautifully explain everything. Everything happens in Fock spaces, which are very much the mathematical equivalent of saying “Wait, we have to have variable numbers of particles now? Ok, screw it, let’s just take all the states that do make sense and…I don’t know, add them up in some hypothetical vector space.” And mathematically you can do that, because of course math lets you do anything so long as it’s rigorous and consistent. But on an intuitive level it looks extremely like a clunky-but-functional description of something else to me.
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My mathing has never been on par with some of my other abilities, but I sort of grasp what you are saying. Math is an exceptionally effective tool to assist in modeling, predicting and understanding the universe and our place in it. But to say math is the universe (or that the universe is math) is a level of abstraction I cannot follow. I accept that folks who do understand that kind of God-level abstract math can get a theoretical handle on things that just conceptually are beyond my grasp, and that this probably represents a higher truth, but I also think we are a long way from being able to make a useful, understandable model of it.
IOW, I are not a smart man. Just tryin’ to get a little learnin’.
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That right there… If we’re truly insignificant specks, it’s a bit of hubris to assume that we can accurately gauge the universe in almost anyway.
And even if it is as people say, we’re not that abstract. We’re here and we’re real and we matter, and we need more than one way to understand the reality around us. Hence other kinds of science. Hence art. Hence history. Hence medicine. Etc. Maths are just one way to grok the universe, and dismissing all over forms of human knowledge is not particularly helpful. There is no ONE right way to grok the world. But lately, we’ve been told over and over again that the only thing that matters is STEM. But history can tell us what kind of path that blinkered way of thinking about reality can lead, and frankly, it’s no where good. But again, we’ve been destroying the humanities and dismissing it for years now. So, people think it’s a fun luxury rather than a necessity in modern life.
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additionally. as per gödel 2, math cannot demonstrate consistency on its own; and, even within a consistent sytem, it is possible to formulate unprovable statements.
i realize there are many ways to interpret the world but we must be open to failure and true to reality at whatever scale is applicable. if the facts are being edited to suit the theory, that’s no science at all.
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Exactly so.
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What I’m saying is that math is how rigorous models are expressed, and when you say “the universe is…” you are inherently going to be offering some kind of model on the other end.
In regard to what Mindy is saying, I should also note that even with Newtonian mechanics, the moment there are as many as three particles the underlying math becomes unsolvable without approximations. A single atom is too much! So while the physics is important it’s at the same time very limited in what it actually helps us understand on its own.
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