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
