Re: The Golden Ratio

On 3/14/24 3:18 PM, J. J. Lodder wrote:

Burkhard <b.schafer@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
 

J. J. Lodder wrote:
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Richmond <dnomhcir@gmx.com> wrote:

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nospam@de-ster.demon.nl (J. J. Lodder) writes:
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dgb <david@nomail.afraid.org> wrote:
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Does this occur by accident?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio
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Or by design?

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Mathematics doesn't occur.
It is.
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If it didn't occur then it is, and always was. But was it so before the
beginning of the universe? or maybe the universe didn't begin, because
time and space are not fundamental properties of nature.

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The universe, whatever it is, or was, or may be
is irrelevant for mathematics,

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Jan

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a) yes, I'm back-ish - blame Lawyer Dagget, who put temptation in my path,
and directed me to an interface that I can use without going through the
hassle of signing up with yet another server :o) Though I'm likely to keep
a lower profile than in the past due to work

 Very good. Very good indeed. Just curious:
Is your new toy capable of wrapping lines to a reasonable length?
 

b) While I'd agree personally, there have been some interesting ideas by
reasonably serious people who've argued that there is a closer connection
than one might think. Most high-profile arguably Eugene Wigner and his
famous paper "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural
Sciences" from 1960. Essentially a mathematics version of the "no miracle"
argument for scientific realism.

 Yes, I know, but this is hardly news.
Plato was already inspired by the unreasonable effectiveness of
mathematics. (as he knew it)
 As for Wigner,
I guess he would feel like committing intellectual suicide
when seeing the present state of Math and Phys.
Could he really bring himself to believe
that "uggly theories are good!"?
Or that Einstein with his ideas of natural beauty had it all wrong?
 He might agree that the state of math and string theory is demonstation
of the incredible uselessness of mathematics on a truly incredible
scale. (worse than ever seen before)
 We now have 10^500 mathematical theories and universes,
give or take a few, and not a single prediction.
The argumnt from design can only be beaten down
with natural selection of universes and anthropic principles.
 Is it possible to do worse? I guess that not even Dr Pangloss
can comfort us with some good words about it,
 Jan
 

  With 10^500 universes, what could go wrong?  No matter what craziness we could propose, there'd be a universe where it worked.  Or my favorite Pauliism:  that's not even wrong!