Another thought: my favorite Einstein quote (other than “Goedel’s gone completely mad: he’s voting for Eisenhower!”) is “The mathematicians can’t tell me what I need to know,” uttered late in his life when he was trying to replace quantum mechanics with a classical “physically realistic” theory — a hopeless errand we now know thanks to the empirical violation of Bell’s inequalities.
The problem is not that the universe might not make sense, but that physicists are trying continually to hang onto the same mathematical toolbox that worked for classical physics and general relativity, when the best indications are that it doesn’t work to describe anything involving quantum phenomena — in particular, space-time won’t end up being a smooth manifold with a Minkowskian metric because the continuum model breaks down at fine scale. I suspect we mathematicians might now be able to tell them what they need to know, but most physicists aren’t asking.
What gets me is that some of the major founders of quantum mechanics such as Einstein and Schrodinger never accepted it as a final theory, or showed an outright dislike for it.
we mathematicians might now be able to tell them what they need to know, but most physicists aren’t asking.
It seems this Soft Science guy (an Anthropology major 25 years ago) that once mathematicians have begun to address things cosmological, they have entered into a philosophical practice. Albeit one rendered sublime by the requisite discipline of mathematics.