zlacker

  > I think you misinterpret what it's about. He's pointing out how remarkable it is that the universe obeys laws like...

I apologize for not being clear. But we are talking about the same thing.

  > The pre scientific understanding of the world was it was driven my gods and spirits.

Winger's paper was written in 1960. I do not think such claims need have been said. Those arguments were prolific and had been made for centuries. He did not need to convince anyone in the scientific community that the laws of nature were not driven by gods and spirits. By the 1960s the scientific age was already mature and it was well established in the community that the laws of nature are not the domain of gospel.

  | "Well, now you are pushing your joke too far," said the classmate, "surely the population has nothing to do with the circumference of the circle."

The point is made here. It is surprising that math describes reality. It is surprising that a circle has anything to do with a population.

I really did mean it when I said "about something that would sound silly today". We take this for granted now, with 60 years of working under this framework, but this wasn't always so. It seems silly now because much of the math we learn is in science classes and even outside we have a particular focus of teaching math most relating to science, but this is a small portion of a much larger field. Fwiw, I am not saying this as a complete outsider, I have a degree in physics.

It is also worth paying attention to the fact that Wigner helped create Mathematical Physics[0]. "Mathematical Physics" is not a pleonasm.

Don't take it just on my word! The Wiki page says something extremely similar!

  | In it, Wigner observes that a theoretical physics's mathematical structure often points the way to further advances in that theory and to empirical predictions. Mathematical theories often have predictive power in describing nature. [1]

  | Wigner argues that mathematical concepts have applicability far beyond the context in which they were originally developed[1]

  > The mathematical laws were only discovered by scientific investigation.

I should make sure this is clear though (unsure which interpretation you intend). Math and science aren't interchangeable. Physics uses the language of math as its main method for developing theories and logic. But it is also important to stress that it doesn't use the same mathematical language throughout. The frameworks that those working in relativity use are not useful for those that work in quantum mechanics. If the math was uniform, we would not be dedicating so much time to bridge these. Nor is math absolute here, as it is a map, and we still rely heavily on the language of experimental evidence.

Yes, he was saying "use maths". Yes, it sounds silly today, but so do a lot of things that needed be said in the past. I see no reason that the (now) obvious claim by Copernicus would make him any less famous.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_physics

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...

>>godels+(OP)
I think we agree on all the facts but I disagree on what his message was and whether it sounds silly these days, which is a matter of opinion I guess.

You have "use maths" which sounds silly, I take it as "the appropriateness of maths is a miracle we don't understand" which is deeper and still largely true.

>>tim333+is1
To change your mind, what would I need to demonstrate? I'm providing third party sources, I have personal experience, I can quote from the original source. What is missing that results in being unconvincing? I want to make sure, there are ways to change your opinion, right?

I really encourage you to read that wiki page.

  | The quantum theory of the Lamb shift, as conceived by Bethe and established by Schwinger, is a purely mathematical theory and the only direct contribution of experiment was to show the existence of a measurable effect. The agreement with calculation is better than one part in a thousand."

I think you're missing a lot of context in that physics was highly non-mathematical in the past. Physicists called Einstein a mathematician. It isn't too hard to see when he asserted that his theories were correct and didn't need experimental confirmation.

  | Hamming argues that Albert Einstein's pioneering work on special relativity was largely "scholastic" in its approach. He knew from the outset what the theory should look like (although he only knew this because of the Michelson–Morley experiment), and explored candidate theories with mathematical tools, not actual experiments. Hamming alleges that Einstein was so confident that his relativity theories were correct that the outcomes of observations designed to test them did not much interest him. If the observations were inconsistent with his theories, it would be the observations that were at fault.

Hell, go read Ian Hacking, any metaphysics, or ask ChatGPT. They will confirm what I'm saying. Even some of this is discussed in An Opinionated History of Mathematics[0], though much more focused on math. I'm more mentioning it because it is good and helps provide some of that historical context.

It is kinda crazy that a thing we created, without the specific intent of modeling the world, ended up being so great at modeling the world. That's the unreasonable effectiveness.

In fairness, to change my opinion, you would need to show me some chain of reasoning or a conversation Wigner is clearly responding to that involves religion. Because this is what I see, but around math not being physics, and is what drives my interpretation.

[0] https://intellectualmathematics.com/opinionated-history-of-m...