I keep on thinking that everything around us is basically just information. Be it DNA, atoms, or spacetime itself. And math is the set of rules that explain the interaction, flow and existence of this information. We did not uncover all the rules yet. Does this make sense?
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Math is a set of rules that are *trying* to describe everything that exists. It’s a journey that we have to go down multiple times, and each time we get more congruent to reality. The better our math gets, the farther out we have to look to find an anomaly.
* “Crystal Spheres” and “Gods” describe the motions of the planets in the sky very badly.
* Later on, we got the Copernican system, which at least describes them as moving in the right direction.
* Later on we got Newton, who was able to describe the motions of the planets in terms of mass and force and long distance relationships. Newtonian planetary motion is extremely accurate: more accurate than anyone was able to measure, except for Mercury. Mercury does it’s own thing.
* later on Einstein worked out the math that can describe the spacetime curvature from the sun’s gravity. Now Mercury’s orbit makes sense again, but there’s still weird stuff up in the sky.
* Right now we’re confused about something called “Hubble Tension” which is a dramatic way of saying the math doesn’t add up on the expansion of the universe. We’re still waiting for the math that fixes this one.
We don’t know if math can describe everything that exists. You’re asking what the end of the journey looks like, and we can’t know that. We don’t know if there *is* an end to this journey. All we can do is take the next step.
Side note: I’m really glad we still use the names of the gods for the other worlds in our system. It’s a great reminder of how far we’ve come.
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