Are Numbers Reality?

 

Numerology is a discredited pseudo-science, but in its updated form, it has attracted the serious attention of a few premier scientists.

 

Ancient philosophers, such as Pythagoras, were deeply impressed by the orderliness and mystery of numbers.  On the one hand, there was a very practical side, while on the other, numbers seemed to speak out from the unplumbed depths of reality.

 

This should be no surprise.  We all know that numbers are critical in very many areas of life, from accounting to zoology, from rocket science to sports.

 

But numbers, while being the heart of the most exacting of disciplines, are also, the most abstract of concepts.  After all, what, really, is a number?  Consider the number, 7, for instance.  One can count seven days in a week, seven steps on a stairway, or seven stars in a constellation.  But while one can have seven of something, one cannot have just “seven,” all by itself.

 

Numbers obey rules.  The rules are known as mathematics.  Where do these rules come from?  Are they universal?  Can they ever change?  Two plus three equals five, and it matters not one’s opinion on the matter.  Ignore the rules, and disaster strikes, whether it be in the form of a rocket exploding on the launch pad, or a tax audit.

 

This is where the mystery comes into play.  Are numbers simply a product of our mind?  Are they simply something we construct?  Or, are they a fundamental reality, no less so than space and time, no less so than quarks and leptons, no less so than our conscious minds?

 

When cosmologists deign to explain the universe, they do so in terms of numbers.  At the fundamental level, the physical universe is defined by its mathematical constants.  According to the Many Universes Hypothesis (MUH), these constants are arbitrarily assigned to various universes by random chance.  But the numbers underlying the constants may be so deeply embedded into reality that they are, in fact, reality itself.

 

Well-known physicist Dr Max Tegmark proposes that the universe is not only described by mathematics, but it actually is mathematics.  He supports this proposal by pointing out that everything that is observed in nature obeys mathematical principles—and that the obedience is so strict that one cannot separate physical reality from the underlying math.

 

Here is an excerpt from Wiki[edia

 

Tegmark's MUH [mathematical universe hypothesis] is: Our external physical reality is a mathematical structure. That is, the physical universe is not merely described by mathematics, but is mathematics (specifically, a mathematical structure). Mathematical existence equals physical existence, and all structures that exist mathematically exist physically as well. Observers, including humans, are "self-aware substructures (SASs)". In any mathematical structure complex enough to contain such substructures, they "will subjectively perceive themselves as existing in a physically 'real' world".

The theory can be considered a form of Pythagoreanism or Platonism in that it proposes the existence of mathematical entities; a form of mathematical monism in that it denies that anything exists except mathematical objects; and a formal expression of ontic structural realism.