God and Math in the Academy

An odd aspect of existence is the compulsion we have to try to make sense of the world. OK, maybe that's not so odd, evolutionarily speaking, but it certainly seems odd that one of our attempts has been so successful. Magic, religion, science, and math are all aspects of that effort to tame reality, but what Wigner called "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in explaining the physical world continues to amaze me. Roger Penrose's Road to Reality reminded me of that once again.

All of which is prolog to saying that I haven't quite decided what to think about the Carr and Giddings article in the May Scientific American about creating black holes in the LHC. On one level it seems like a prayerfull plea to The Lord to bail out string theory, or maybe just "wouldn't it be cool if..." I don't see much compelling reason in string theory or out to suspect that it will happen, but I guess it would be cool. On the other hand, I might find it even cooler if the LHC revealed something really new and unanticipated, like the photon, the muon and the strange particles were.

So I guess I'm cheering for the idea that God, or the Universe, not run out of surprises yet. Though I'm pretty sure that the Universe doesn't care.

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