MIT physicist and cosmologist Max Tegmark says in his book Our Mathematical Universe that math is the universe. And many believe that ideas without a mathematical foundation are not science at all.
Jesus had an opinion on this sort of thing. He said about the strictness of the high priests of his day, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. The same is true of mathematics in science. Math is a tool of science. Science is not a tool of math. Or to paraphrase Einstein, science is a sacred gift and mathematics is the faithful servant. Sometimes the scientific community worships the faithful servant and forgets the sacred gift.
In other words, often math helps us understand the cosmos. But the living things in the cosmos vastly outstrip our math. Newton was able to reduce the solar system to math. But if Darwin had been forced to mathematize his On the Origin of Species, there would have been no evolution. No Darwinism. No Origin of Species.
Which explains more, Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica or Darwin’s Origin of the Species? In reality, they are both potent tools of understanding. But the number of puzzles that neither of them can solve is vast.
Each of them–Darwin’s approach and Newton’s– is far more limited than it imagines. And math is far more limited in its powers than today’s scientific community thinks.
It’s important to keep this in mind. Without equations we regard many scientific papers as worthless. But Newton’s Principia had almost no equal signs. In other words, Newton did not have modern algebraic equations. He expressed his laws with the math of his day: geometry, ratios, diagrams, and verbal reasoning. Today it would be said that Newton’s Principia is not sufficiently mathematical to be taken as serious science.
We forget that the equation was only invented in 1557 and only put to common use 80 years later. The equation is not a cosmic building block. It is a temporary flash-in-the pan. In other words, our math is primitive. It’s the equivalent of the first collection of stone tools 3.2 million years ago in Kenya, the Lomekwian stone toolkit.
The new developments in math 300 years from now will startle us. But science will still be mistaken if it imagines that all that we see and know can be expressed in equations.
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Which means that Max Tegmark is wrong. The cosmos is not a product of math. Math is a product of the cosmos. And the most startling thing in this universe, life, is ahead of the meager grasp of equations by light-years.
References:
Tegmark, Max. 2014. Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. New York: Knopf.
Newton, Isaac. Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. London: Royal Society, 1687. Printed by Joseph Streater.
Darwin, Charles. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray.
Bible. 1611. The Holy Bible, King James Version. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mark 2:27.
Recorde, Robert. 1557. The Whetstone of Witte: Which is the Second Part of Arithmetike: Containyng the Extraction of Rootes: The Cossike Practise, with the Rule of Equation: and the Woorkes of Surde Nombers. London: John Kyngstone.
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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his eight books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” Bloom’s next book, coming out March, 2025, is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.institute