DOES ALL PHYSICAL REALITY CONSIST OF MATHEMATICS? The cosmologist Max Tegmark believes that the answer is yes. He says in this interview that, “Mathematical things actually exist, and they are actually physical reality…..A mathematical structure doesn’t describe a universe, it is a universe….[and] every mathematical structure is another universe.” I began this blog with a reference (I didn’t know how to do links) to an article that said that there is evidence of the Big Bang; the echo makes up a lot of the static you hear on the radio. I can’t imagine the kind of evidence that could exist for an infinite number of parallel universes. But apparently that’s what the mathematical equations say if you take them as seriously as Tegmark takes them. (Link via Instapundit).
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I was once talking to my brilliant high school math teacher, Sister Teresa Angela, about my sister’s inability to “relate to” math. My sister had actually said to me, “I don’t even know what math is!” And I had replied to her, “It’s the study of relationships.” I should have said it is the study of symbolic relationships,” but Sr. Teresa was content with what I’d said when I repeated it to her. Anybody who thinks that math describes a real world outside of concrete reality should put down his Plato and start reading Aristotle.