Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7471049" data-attributes="member: 16814">I think this.  I'm an engineer, and rely on math daily to create.  But, I also think that math cannot be proven by anything other than inference, and therefore a lot of our knowledge that is based on math is similarly based on inference.  This means that it's possible that the math we trust is merely a good enough model for where we are, much like Newtonian physics is good enough for most daily needs but unreliable for things like space travel (GPS satellites don't work without a relativistic correction to time, frex).  Maybe we're incapable of doing better, maybe one day we will, maybe what we have is right, but there's enough places where the math we now understand just fails to work that I can't really fully believe we have it right.  Right enough for now, sure.Example:  the imaginary number. It's critical to many functions in our daily life -- AC power, communications, etc.  However, it has no mathematical representation we can resolve.  For those that don't know, the imaginary number is the representation of the square root of -1.  There exists no number that, when multiplied by itself, equals -1.  But we have math that generates square roots of negative numbers that we need to resolve, so we've invoked the imaginary number to do the work.  And it does the work -- we get answers we can use to predict and operate on.  However, we've had to break our fundamental understanding of numbers to do so and apply a patch.  That's not a feature of a discovered truth, it's a feature of a theory that has a hole that can be patched with a few assumptions.  Who knows, perhaps there's a number concept out there that handles the imaginary number naturally and also does everything else we need it to do, or maybe we have the whole thing wrong but it's still hella useful anyway (all models are wrong, some are useful), or maybe it really is unanswerable by our intellect or by the current state of physical laws.</blockquote>

Verification