Review of 2023 book: How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology Philip Ball. ISBN9781529095999

  • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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    5 months ago

    That’s ridiculous, if I think that one apple plus one apple is going to result in three apples then I try it and find it’s actually two I’m not going to blame the universe I’m going to know my understanding of arithmetic is flawed.

    It’s not the math of the human made model that controls the universe that would be silly. The model is the current best approximation of the actual math that defines the universe.

    An accurate model allows you to predict the outcome of events, like we can predict how many apples will be in the bag. With some things it gets very complicated because there’s lots of things and various possible states but we can model that with statistics and calculous and stuff. We can even make a set of all possibile results and use that as a map to tell us if something is possible, how likely it is and what we can do to make it more or less likely - nothing the guy said was controversial, we can map cellar interactions even if that requires using complex multidimensional math (mathematics have had to get used to doing this sort of math a lot recently so I’m sure they’ll manage)