Reality

I just finished reading one of the most fascinating books I have come across this year. This book, “Our Mathematical Universe: My quest for the ultimate nature of reality,” by Max Tegmark, an MIT professor of physics, is full of great insights regarding our universe and the nature of reality. While I cannot do justice in a short Blog Post what he says in a four hundred-page book, I thought some of his nuggets of wisdom might provoke thoughts in your mind.

“If we assume that reality exists independently of humans, then for a description to be complete, it must be well defined according to nonhuman entities—aliens or supercomputers, say—that lack any understanding of human concepts. Put differently, such a description must be expressible in a form that is devoid of any human baggage like “particle,” or other English words.”

The first point he is making is that reality is not just some illusion created by our senses, but it exists independently of us. He calls the reality from our perspective as similar to what a frog sees/feels if living in a well. That is not what a bird will see. It will see what is equivalent to a reality that exists beyond what we sense. (He actually has a third level between the bird and the frog perspectives---one he calls interrelated consensus perspective, but let’s not go there.)

The second point he makes is that in the bird perspective (reality independent of humans) things like a particle should be expressible without using the word “particle”. In one of my earlier Blog Posts, I had discussed what would happen if we did not have a name attached to us (December 2013). This is a similar situation; here he calls the names for things---a human baggage.

“All physics theories have two components: mathematical equations and “baggage”---words that explain how the equations are connected to what we observe and intuitively understand. When we derive the consequences of a theory, we introduce new concepts and words for them, such as protons, atoms, molecules, cells and stars, because they are convenient.  However, it is we humans who create these concepts; in principle, everything could be calculated without this baggage.”

He then goes on to hypothesize that if you remove that human baggage, we are left with nothing but mathematics.

“Atoms are made of elementary particles, which are purely mathematical structures in the sense that their only properties are mathematical properties.”

“If you believe in an external reality independent of humans, then you must also believe that our physical reality is a mathematical structure. Nothing else has a baggage-free description.”

So, what he conjectures is that not only is our universe explainable by mathematics, it actually is nothing but a grand mathematical structure. 

Bizarre, eh? He expects us to feel that way.

“Evolution has endowed us with intuition only for those everyday aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, leading to the prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond human scale, our evolved intuition should break down.”

Now I know why I have such a hard time understanding Theory of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics or the concept that the universe is nothing but a gigantic mathematical structure. J