Did they finally find the math particle?
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One of the ways Iâve 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 âspaceâ and âtimeâ, but those ideas donât 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. Doesnât mean you donât need other fields to help us understand the universe and our place in it. 
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Saying people donât matter, because maths is not particularly helpful dude. WE do exist and while math is a useful tool for understanding doesnât make everything we do insignificant or pointless. Itâs a bit insulting to say that⊠I get that the universe is big, vast, etc⊠But WEâRE still here and have to make the best of the time we have. That MATTERS and Iâm frankly sick of being told it doesnât. 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, Iâm just some dumb failed academic, so what the fuck do I knowâŠ
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Speaking as a Black woman surviving in America:
My âplaceâ 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 itsâ current state of decline.
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To some extent I donât think the distinction is a meaningful one. Our conception of reality has always been a model. Our minds donât encounter persistent objects â 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. Iâm not sure what the difference between a universe of math and not of math would be.
That saidâŠdo you know how quantum field theory actually works? Itâs 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 âWait, we have to have variable numbers of particles now? Ok, screw it, letâs just take all the states that do make sense andâŠI donât know, add them up in some hypothetical vector space.â And mathematically you can do that, because of course math lets you do anything so long as itâs 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 tryinâ to get a little learninâ.
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That right there⊠If weâre truly insignificant specks, itâs a bit of hubris to assume that we can accurately gauge the universe in almost anyway.
And even if it is as people say, weâre not that abstract. Weâre here and weâre 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, weâve 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, itâs no where good. But again, weâve been destroying the humanities and dismissing it for years now. So, people think itâs 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, thatâs no science at all.
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Exactly so.
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What Iâm saying is that math is how rigorous models are expressed, and when you say âthe universe isâŠâ 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 itâs at the same time very limited in what it actually helps us understand on its own.
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Models are always going to be imperfect approximations, whatever the field. Can we even understand the ârealâ? I just donât know⊠but we have to have ways to understand the reality we live in, even if theyâre imperfect. I just fully reject the notion that there is one ârightâ way of understanding and humbly submit that knowledge is always a collective effort that needs a variety of perspectives to fully grok. Thatâs a very enlightenment-centric view, that all fields of study are inherently valuable, because they give us a piece of this very complex puzzle.
But we need to understand that there has been an effort in recent years (especially since the end of the Cold War) to bury some forms of knowledge because it speaks some needed truth to power, specifically the humanities. Because it centers people and our many ways of actually existing in the world, itâs considered dangerous by some who wish to retain power at the expense of the rest of us. But, much like forms of oppression weâre seeing rise up now (like that aimed at trans folks), if they can target fields like the humanities, they will come for everything else. Thatâs how itâs been playing out. The 2008 crash gave an in for dismantling humanities departments in universities around the world. Now they are coming for everyone else that dares to do anything other than parrot the oligarchâs talking points.
Itâs time we give up this stupid point less âSTEM v. humanitiesâ war and focus on the actual threat to universities and the pursuit of human knowledge in general.
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But math is a social construct. Which makes it he endeavor a bit solipsistic.
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TANGENT INCOMING!
Mindy, your use of the typically UK English âmathsâ over the USAian âmathâ has intrigued me!
Is it a personal affectation? Is there a story behind it? Is it an academic thing?
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Honestly, I just like the way it sounds⊠probably a byproduct of too much Doctor Who!
And other British showsâŠ
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You know my husband and I talk about this from time to time and thereâs always something dancing on the back of my mind with it because I actually agree. Like fully agree.
But MATH is also a human exercise, another people thing, a philosophy, a practice, a way we use our consciousness to understand the universe. You could just as easily say that dance, or music, or poetry is a way to understand the universe as math.
Math is the best tool for predicting material phenomena.
But i guess what really bothers me is that if I understand anything about the universe itâs that reductive logic doesnât describe it well. Call it math or call it music but it depends on what part of the universe one is trying to understand.
I guess I just wish that where this got us more often than not was more⊠like, a shared joy in the mutual experience of understanding what we can in our little lives.
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The way I see it frankly, we are buggy meat computers incapable of analyzing our own infrastructure and most of our understanding comes from a constantly degenerating script we cobble together from a fusion of memory and fantasy regulated by hormones and sleep cycles.
Concepts like ârealâ are just going to break us if we try to make sense of them.
As the great Michael Gira said: âyouâre not real, girl.â
Itâs fun sometimes to walk up to the limits of my own mind and look out and think âshiii⊠bet thereâs a lot more than that out there.â But ultimately thatâs what math gets you too. Humanistic supremacy is a pointless concept at scale. We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky.
Fuck yeah!
I was studying âthe Artsâ in that liminal space where they kicked it out out of the humanities into the vocations but then didnât put it into steAm yet.
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