FastSaying

Besides the traditional questions of where or what the Platonic world of perfect mathematical blueprints actually is, this view moves us towards a number of deep and fascinating questions. It elevates mathematics pretty close to the status of God in traditional theology. Just take any work of medieval theology and alter the word 'God' to 'mathematics' wherever it appears and it makes pretty good sense. Mathematics is part of the world, and yet transcends it. It must exist before and after the Universe. In this respect, it is reminiscent of our discussion of the nature of time in earlier chapters. In the Newtonian world-view, both space and time were absolute and independent of the events played out upon them. Then the Einsteinian transformation of our concepts of space and time (whose radicalness is obscured by the fact that the concepts retained the same names) linked space and time to events going on within the Universe. Maybe a similar evolution of this interpretation of mathematics will emerge? Although at present mathematics seems to transcend the Universe because cosmologists think they can actually describe the Universe as a whole in terms of mathematics and use mathematics to study the process of creation and annihilation of universes, perhaps the nature of mathematics will become more closely associated with physically realizable processes like counting or computing?

John D. Barrow

Related Quotes

Aristotle draws a sharp dividing-line between the activities of the physicist and those of the mathematician. The mathematician limits his enquiry to the quantifiable aspects of the world and so dramatically restricts what is describable in mathematical terms. Physics, for Aristotle, was far wider in scope and encompassed the earthly reality of sensible things. Whereas Plato had maintained that mathematics was the true and deep reality of which the physical world was but a pale reflection, Aristotle claimed mathematics to be but a superficial representation of a piece of physical reality. Such is the contrast between idealism and realism in the ancient world.
— John D. Barrow
If the Universe possesses intrinsically random elements in their make up, inherited from its quantum origins or from random symmetry-breakings during its early evolution, then we must take our own existence into account when evaluating the correspondence between reality and the cosmological predictions of any Theory of Everything. Moreover, if these random cosmological elements lead to a Universe which differs significantly from place to place over the very large distances, then our local observations of a possibly infinite Universe will inevitably leave our knowledge of its global structure seriously incomplete.
— John D. Barrow
The fact that simultaneous discovery occurs in mathematics, as well as the sciences, points toward some objective element within their subject matter that is independent of the psyche of the investigator.
— John D. Barrow
The ease with which collaboration occurs in mathematical research and the essential similarity of the fruits of such collaboration to that of individual work points suggestively towards a powerful objective element behind the scenes that is discovered rather than invented.
— John D. Barrow
Plato argued that the material world of visible things was but a shadow of the true reality of eternal forms. He proceeds to explain the nether world of eternal blueprints most completely in the case of the elements of matter: earth, air, fire, and water. These he represents by geometrical solids: the earth by a cube, water by an icosahedron, air by an octahedron, and fire by a tetrahedron. His position is that ultimately the elements are just these solid geometrical shapes not simply that they possess geometrical shapes as one of their properties. The transmutation of elements one into the other is then explained by the merger and dissolution of triangles. This strictly mathematical description characterizes Plato's discussion of many other physical problems, For him, mathematics is a pointer to the ultimate reality of the world of forms that overshadows the visible world of sense data. The better we can grasp it, the closer we can come to true knowledge. Thus, for Plato, mathematics is more fundamental, truer, closer to the eternal forms of which the visible world is an imperfect reflection, than the objects of physical science. Because the world is mathematical at its deepest level, all visible phenomena will have mathematical aspects and be describable by mathematics to a greater or lesser extent, determined by their closeness to their underlying forms.
— John D. Barrow