

Physics’s pangolin - sdabdoub
http://aeon.co/magazine/science/margaret-wertheim-the-limits-of-physics/

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ttctciyf
Some interesting stuff, such as

> You do not need to be a hard-core dualist to imagine that subjective
> experience might not be amenable to mathematical law

(difficult to argue but worth considering, from my POV)

The presentation of the argument (that the increasingly counterintuitive
implications of mathematical theories of physical reality represent some kind
of progressive societal neurosis in the face of fundamental
incommensurability) seems a little confused, in that it conflates things like
the string theory Landscape and the many-worlds interpretation with perfectly
testable theories like QM. I think it's reasonable to have a physical theory
that seems like nonsense, so long as the theory passes experimental tests and
there's no better theory that does. Why should we expect tiny tiny bits of the
universe to be unsurprising to relatively gigantic inhabitants, etc? Whereas
my lay impression of The Landscape, the Anthropic Principle, and so on, is
that they seem like so much flailing around in the dark, and can support the
author's case a lot better - the accusation of neurotic ritual behaviour seems
to find more fertile ground with proponents of untestable theories than with
those espousing well-tested but absurd-seeming ones.

Though Platonism is a common enough accusation, I wonder if the author is
really objecting to Pythagoreanism, whose adherents profess: "all things that
are, are numbers" \- a narrower claim than Plato's ideal realm, perhaps, and
so maybe an easier target. After all, at least one Pythagorean was
neurotically (if apocryphally) murdered for revealing the embarrassing
incommensurability of the square root of two, which goes well with the
article's thesis.

