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> While it can be used to describe the reality we experience about our universe, it can also create imagined universes that have only the most tenuous grasp (if
by jackcosgrove 6y ago
> While it can be used to describe the reality we experience about our universe, it can also create imagined universes that have only the most tenuous grasp (if any). Like any language it supports fiction and non-fiction applications.
Maybe I am wading into well-charted waters and thinking of something others have already hashed out, but if our universe only applies a subset of math, could that also mean there is another universe where a different subset of math is applicable? And the multiverse in sum encompasses all math?
Platonism would then be true at the most global scope, but empiricism is necessary to discover what part of math our particular universe encompasses.
- vlovich123 6y agoHow are you defining the word “universe”? Is it in a hypothetical imagined virtual universe? If so then yes, that happens regularly in mathematics (eg Carl Sagan’s flatworld). If you’re asking “are there multiple real universes in reality with some kind of relationship between them” we don’t know yet and until we have a falsifiable theory that withstands experiments we won’t know. Mathematics can be used to prove certain properties in the absence of those experiments and to explain how a theory might be falsifiable. An example of this would be string theory. Mathematically self-consistent, all available evidence seems to be against it (can’t recall if it was finally disproven or still just highly unlikely to be true)