Buy or subscribe. This is a preview of subscription content. Change institution. Buy article Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube. References 1 Shikhovtsev, E. Google Scholar 2 Tegmark, M.
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Close banner Close. Email address Sign up. For example: the female is likened to the number two and the male to the number three. Number five, is likened to marriage. To the early Pythagoreans number became a sort of cosmic matter, very much like air and water. They stressed numerical proportions, harmony and order Thesleff In the fourth century BCE, Plato developed his theory of forms according to which there is a separate realm of ideal immutable forms which are fundamental to reality.
On this account, a particular woman in the sensible world is objectively beautiful by virtue of partaking in the abstract form of beauty. As such they are unchanging and causally inefficacious. Many philosophers, most notably realistic anti-Platonists and nominalists, would reject the idea of the existence of abstract objects.
Balaguer Through his influence, natural philosophy was transformed from a verbal qualitative narrative to a mathematical description Van Helden To conclude: the idea that mathematics and the world are somehow connected has emerged in different shapes and forms over a period of 2, years in Western thinking: mathematics describes reality, governs reality or is fundamental to reality. The physicist and cosmologist Max Tegmark stands in this philosophical tradition but takes a more radical approach: for him, reality is not just described or governed by mathematics, it is mathematics , p.
One way of understanding this proposal is to think of a point-like particle moving around in a three-dimensional space. The particle and its behaviour can be fully described in mathematical terms, using for instance mass q, momentum p and a number of equations such as the Wave Function taken from quantum physics. The idea is that the complete set of mathematical descriptions actually makes up the deeper reality of this particle.
So in that sense, an electron is a purely mathematical object. The two approaches help to understand what Tegmark means when he says that reality is essentially mathematical.
The next question is how to apply the mathematical thinking to cosmology. This view is closely aligned with scientific realism which is committed to a mind-independent and language independent world Liston, chapter 5.
It states that the external reality is a mathematical structure Tegmark , p. With mathematical structures he means sets of abstract entities with relations between them. Examples for such sets of entities are numbers, vectors and geographical objects. The symbols are just a human convention.
What really matters are the properties of entities and their relations, i. Click here for my new multiverse FAQ. Welcome to my parallel universe page. Barrow, P. Harper eds.
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