Abstract
The success of mathematics in the natural sciences, and especially in physics, suggest that mathematics is a real and deep feature of the natural world rather than a mere convention invented by human beings. Yet does this suggest the idea first imagined by Pythagoras and Plato that nature itself is fundamentally mathematical? This essay proposes a weak version of Max Tegmark’s Mathematical Universe Hypothesis that might allow us to use the past and future of physics as a benchmark for whether the universe is a mathematical structure.
Rick Searle