Doing the Math

> From this.

So to make some more observation into the meaning of things, again to notice how much we take for granted, music we’ve covered, but then there’s the subject of mathematics. Physics, more precisely. This is what Albert was talking about how incomprehensible it is the universe’s comprehensibility. Does anyone find it a bit convenient that there are equations that can predict how things will behave in reality? It has made some people think that God is a mathematician at heart, though I believe differently on that matter. But how eerie is it that Newton’s laws of gravitation so closely match how things behave, but then Einstein comes along, and we have an even more precise description of how things must happen?

The greatest gift to knowledge of the twentieth century is the sense of uncertainty — just before it, the Enlightenment had physicists thinking we’d figured it all out, just some trivial details remained to be found. How wrong we were. But the universe seems to be profoundly weirder than we ever before believed it could be. And yet, we can make sense of it. You don’t find that at all peculiar? It’s almost like it makes sense of itself to us. There was one scientist who likened mathematics to archeology. It may seem like a strange comparison, as we like to think of math as being a strictly logical endeavor, but really, it’s a matter of where exactly you’re digging, in both sciences. Sometimes to make a fortuitous discovery, sometimes to dig for years and years and come up with nothing.

If you really think about it, all of science has just barely scratched the surface in the lines of inquiry that currently exist, not to mention the lines of inquiry that have yet to be discovered. Like that dim gold space that I had a vision of, that stretched (as far as I could tell) out to infinity, so is that which can be known about the universe. If God is God, as advertised, this world is stranger than we can imagine. Until we discover it.

When we do discover it, most likely, it will conform to some mathematics. It is utterly strange how closely the weirdest things in our world are explained by purely mental constructs. Why is it that math works so well, but doesn’t, in fact, seem to be “it”, exactly? What does it mean? To the faithful, everything speaks of the Creator, and to the unbeliever, no evidence is sufficient. Mathematics is its own landscape, hearkening to an archeological paradigm again. It is a land within a land, a universe within this universe. Perhaps why it explains things so well is that it exists within the world it is explaining. And perhaps it points to something more: an order above all the observed orders, that explains why it does, in fact, work. Just a thought.


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