What scares you more: that I will talk of death, and injustice, and spiritual annihilation? Or that I will explain how the equation
Pfi = ∑ Γ(S)
affects your life?
Admit it. You want death. You want injustice.
You want spiritual annihilation.
I get it, I get it. Math is an annoyance; math is anathema. As it did for the learn’d astronomer, math makes you unaccountable tired and sick.
Maybe math scares you. Or worse—maybe math bores you. Fear you can take, and anxiety in equal measure; but boredom, never. It wasn’t time but boredom that sunk Ozymandias into the lone and level sands. Because—
Because (you say) math is about numbers. That’s it. It’s just numbers. By enumerating, you take away a spark. That which can be counted, can be dismissed. A mathematician is a bean counter with a pocket protector, somewhere on the spectrum, digitizing nature, walling off the soul with a wall of 1’s and 0’s.
But it isn’t true.
I could plead that mathematicians don’t usually think of numbers. They think about patterns, symmetries, interconnectedness. They see math in the petals of a daisy, and in the predator/prey cycle of lynx and snowshoe hares. Math is in the strength of nanowires, and the delicacy of hoar frost, and the oomph of an engine, and the whorls of a Spirograph.
I could plead that math is about connections, structures. Math is the study of logical systems. Numbers are beside the point.
Beside the point.
I’m looking right now at the white-board in my office. Ignore the calendar with a picture of Crater Lake, and ignore the poster of Han in Carbonite, and ignore the Albert Einstein action figure, and the pamphlet which says “Welcome Aboard Marine One.” Focus on the white-board itself: it’s covered with equations, in red and green and blue, with doodles, starts and stops, arrows and spirals, letters both Roman and Greek. There are graphs of velocity vs. time. There’s a derivative, and an integral. There’s Newton’s 2nd Law, half-erased.
There are no numbers on the board.
I could plead still, but here is what I know: that math is beauty, and that the whole world is math. Here in my ivory tower, I adhere to the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, which posits that the multiverse is itself is “just” a mathematical structure. It’s not infinite turtles, but math, all the way down.
Jump if you like: you’ll never hit the bottom.
And what of the equation I gave? What does it say? To whom does it speak?
It comes from a paper I wrote, across a gulf of years and disciplines. It says, in English, that the probability of going from quantum state A to quantum state B is the sum of all the products of closed-loop amplitudes that include A and B.
I am A.
You are B.
To get from me to you, we have to count all the ways we can interact, including ways that go backwards from you to me.
We add up all the ways.
And in the end you don’t have a number, but possibilities.
Many Worlds Theory 
Love this – thank you for sharing! 🙂
A very good example of why mathematicians, like many scientists, should stay within the work of their field, and leave definitions to lexicographers, as well as philosophers and historians of math and science.
The notion that misconceptions of math’s proper definition can corrected by (very good, inspiring) poetic appeals to rapturous beauty suggests why mathematicians are the most likely members of the science community to believe in supernatural beings. As indicated, some even believe their field to be on a par with a creation deity itself. 1+1 = 2 only given some very specific assumptions of which the overwhelming majority of mathematicians seem completely unaware. So long as their work stays within the appropriate application area, this is generally not a problem. It can, however, be troubling to those with a broader perspective. Scientists can be the worst purveyors of scientific myths, such as attributing religion as the primary reason heliocentrism was rejected. I would claim this is based in some measure on the widespread myth that “the scientific method” reflects actual practice.
Bless your heart! You must not have realized that I wrote a PERSONAL, poetic essay about my OWN opinions about the beauty and meaning of mathematics, on my own PERSONAL blog. This ain’t a peer-reviewed journal. If it upset your world view, then I’m sorry. But vituperative, incoherent, bitter diatribes have no place here. My blog, my rules. As to your idea that I should “stay within my field” and leave philosophy to philosophers, well, I have published TWO peer-reviewed journal articles on philosophy, so what does that make me? Oh yeah, it makes me an ACTUAL philosopher.
Seems like you have way to many burnt synapses….
Hey Matt, how does the many worlds interpretation deal with the interference pattern going away when there is a detector at the two slits since the wave function never collapses and the universe never actually splits?
There’s no such thing as wave function collapse in the MWI. The concept was invented by Copenhagenists who needed comfort. In the MWI we have decoherence, which explains the double slit experiment perfectly.
Hello Matthew,
My opinion is that some of assumptions underlying the post are insufficiently examined and incorrect. As you say, you are free to judge that opinion as “vituperative, incoherent, bitter diatribes”. That seems perhaps a stronger reaction than you might normally write.
If either of your journal articles on philosophy” relate to my opinion, I hope you’ll share links.
As a rule, I am delighted to have my mind changed by preponderance of evidence, compelling argument, better logic, pretty much anything consistent with good analysis. I’ll be more than happy to learn my assessment was mistaken.
I wrote a poem, disguised as an essay. You somehow think that criticizing the “assumptions” of the poem is somehow constructive, or something I would appreciate. Wrong on both counts. And I have no desire to engage in a “debate” over my assumptions because this is not science. It’s just a poem, and an attack on a poem by an internet troll.
The essay disguise successfully fooled me. My apologies.
So when an electron decoheres, the different regions of the electrons wave function that have decohered can’t interact with eachother?
…A route through the maze
I got to say possibilities are encouraging and humbly i just want to quote from my “Plato in 90 minutes”
‘Plato would be profoundly influenced by Pythagoras’ famous saying: “Everything is number.” (…) Pythagoras believed that beyond the confused world of appearances lies an abstract and harmonious world of numbers. In fact, his conception of number was closer to what we would call “form” (…)’
Two worlds that exchange energy somehow.