Peter Rowlands

Abstract:

The ‘unreasonable’ effectiveness of mathematics in physics was famously proposed as a problem by Eugene Wigner in 1960. The explanation is far from obvious, as the vast bulk of mathematics has never found a significant physical application, while the physical world often resists the easy extensions that mathematics could provide. It is easy, for example, in mathematics to create theories of physics with 10 and 11 dimensions, yet the physical world we observe obstinately refuses to allow more than 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time. Something in physics causes this restriction, which is not a logical outcome of the mathematics. There must be another principle at work. We will propose that the mathematics most successfully used in physics is not an ‘application’ of a pre-existing independent system but a natural growth that emerges with the fundamental concepts it describes, and that nature operates on an astonishingly simple algorithm which is similar to but not identical with the principles of computer science. The physics that results effectively creates its own mathematical structure, which also seems to have applications in biology and other areas of science.