Archive for the 'Math' Category

What Are You Surest Of?

Among the things you’re sure of, which are you surest of? For Richard Dawkins, writing in the Wall Street Journal, it’s the theory of evolution:

We know, as certainly as we know anything in science, that [evolution] is the process that has generated life on our own planet.

Now, I would be thunderstruck if the theory of evolution turned out to be fundamentally wrong, but not nearly so thunderstruck as if arithmetic turned out to be inconsistent. In fact, I can think of quite a few things I’m more sure about than evolution. For example:

1. The consistency of arithmetic. (This amounts to saying that a single arithmetic problem can’t have two different correct answers.)

2. The existence of conscious beings other than myself.

3. The fact that the North won the American Civil War. (That is, historians are not universally mistaken about this. I am not interested in quibbling about what constitutes a “win”; I mean to assert that the North won in the everyday sense of the word, as reported in all the history texts.)
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The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Physics

In The Big Questions (pages 18-19) I talk (channeling the physicist Eugene Wigner) about the apparently unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in revealing truths about the physical world. In Wigner’s words, “It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here.”

But the physicist Peter Landsberg (no relation!) observes that sometimes the miracle runs in the opposite direction, and offers a curious use of physical reasoning to reveal a purely mathematical truth!

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