2018-Sustainable Industrial Processing Summit
SIPS2018 Volume 1. Afonso Intl. Symp. / Iron and Steel Making
| Editors: | F. Kongoli, M.-C. Gomez-Marroquin, M. Contrucci, N. Lacerda, F. V. Cancado, M. de Souza, R. Valladares |
| Publisher: | Flogen Star OUTREACH |
| Publication Year: | 2018 |
| Pages: | 184 pages |
| ISBN: | 978-1-987820-82-9 |
| ISSN: | 2291-1227 (Metals and Materials Processing in a Clean Environment Series) |
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The "Unreasonable" Effectiveness of Mathematics in Physics
Peter Rowlands1;1UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL, Liverpool, United Kingdom;
Type of Paper: General Plenary
Id Paper: 443
Topic: 46
Abstract:
The "unreasonable" effectiveness of mathematics in physics was famously proposed as a problem by Eugene Wigner in 1960 [1], and little progress has been made towards an explanation in the intervening years. It is, however, a very significant question, as the vast bulk of mathematics has never found a significant physical application, while the physical world often resists the easy extensions that mathematics could provide. For all, the many theories based on higher dimensionalities, for example, the world as normally observed seems to be confined to a 3-dimensional space and 1-dimensional time. It is proposed here that the mathematics that is most successfully used in physics is not an "application" of an external system, but a natural growth that emerges with the fundamental concepts it describes. Capturing that growth within a universal rewrite system, based on computer science principles, means that we can find the mathematical representations that are closest to the natural processes they describe, which are not always the ones most commonly used. This leads to an improved understanding of many aspects of physics, and even other areas of science, such as biology, where some of the same mathematical principles apply.