Re:Is the Universe Made of Math?
by kazinator on Sunday July 02, 2017 @11:23AM
(#14682887)
> Physics may be mathematical, but that doesn't mean you can start from the Big Bang and use mathematical physics to predict the contents of this particular thread on Hacker News.
Only because the only available approaches for even beginning to do anything of that sort are constrained by being embedded in that same universe.
It's unsurprising that a system cannot exist, and at the same time embed a calculation which calculates all of itself.
(We cannot even use mathematics to predict simple N-body problems; we have to switch to numerical techniques which have limited precision. Once you have floating-point in there, it's no longer the math, but an approximation.)
Only because the only available approaches for even beginning to do anything of that sort are constrained by being embedded in that same universe.
It's unsurprising that a system cannot exist, and at the same time embed a calculation which calculates all of itself.
(We cannot even use mathematics to predict simple N-body problems; we have to switch to numerical techniques which have limited precision. Once you have floating-point in there, it's no longer the math, but an approximation.)