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And the Math Will Set You Free

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Trick or Truth?

Part of the book series: The Frontiers Collection ((FRONTCOLL))

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Abstract

Can mathematics help us find our way through all the wonders and mysteries of the universe? When physicists describe the laws governing the physical world, mathematics is always involved. Is this due to the fact that the universe is, at least in part, mathematical? Or rather mathematics is merely a tool used by physicists to model phenomena? Is mathematics just a language to tell the story of our universe, a story which could be told with the same or even more effectiveness using another language? Or quite the opposite, the universe is just a mathematical structure?

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This is a mathematical expression of David Lewis’s modal realism [34–36].

  2. 2.

    Whatever “understanding” may mean for Turing machines, perhaps “to understand” means “to simulate”.

  3. 3.

    Don’t forget to take into consideration the possibility of Boltzmann brains—intelligent entities that appeared spontaneously, without a history, because of fluctuations [41].

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Alma Ionescu for helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Theoretical Physics, NIPNE, Bucharest, Romania

    Ovidiu Cristinel Stoica

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  1. Ovidiu Cristinel Stoica
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Correspondence to Ovidiu Cristinel Stoica .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept of Physics, UC Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California, USA

    Anthony Aguirre

  2. Foundational Questions Institute, Decatur, Georgia, USA

    Brendan Foster

  3. Foundational Questions Institute, Decatur, Georgia, USA

    Zeeya Merali

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Stoica, O.C. (2016). And the Math Will Set You Free. In: Aguirre, A., Foster, B., Merali, Z. (eds) Trick or Truth?. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27495-9_20

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