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Along the lines of The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences (also, Hamming's one)? One factor is that mathematical notation was sh
by hyperpallium 9y ago
Along the lines of The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences (also, Hamming's one)?
One factor is that mathematical notation was shaped to describe natural laws (over many different laws). Though I agree that this doesn't seem to fully explain the simplicity and generality.
However, I do want to note that Occam's razor can justify whatever you like, if you're allowed to define the language you use without it counting as entities (like choosing a prior for Bayes').
- lisper 9y ago> I do want to note that Occam's razor can justify whatever you like, if you're allowed to define the language you use without it counting as entities No, that's actually not true. This is one of the cool things about Kolmogorov complexity, it is actually independent of the computational model. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Invariance_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Invarian...
- EGreg 9y agoBut not independent of the description language. In fact, highly dependent on your choice of it.
- lisper 9y agoNo. That's the whole point of Turing equivalence. The description language doesn't matter at all. It only changes the absolute measure of KC by a constant factor. But we don't care about the absolute measure (because KC is not computable anyway). All we care about is upper bounds (because that's all we can compute) and the relative size of the KC of one system compared to another. No matter how you slice it, the KC of physics is orders of magnitude less than the KC of a person (or a god). That's the reason people can actually do physics.