The original question was:
Mathematicians sometimes say, “There exists a number such that . . .” Which provokes me to ask, Where does it exist? For how long has it existed? Did numbers exist before people did? Or did people somehow create (instead of discover) them?
In her “Incompleteness” quasi-biography of Godel (not a bad mathematician), Rebecca Goldstein emphasizes that he was a Platonist about math. What’s the current state of Platonism in math?
And such questions can be extended to the “laws” of physics: Do they exist? If so, where? And for how long? Are they discovered (implying prior existence) or invented/created by humans?
Some comments relating to such issues would be interesting!
Physicist: Discovered. Although most of the laws that can be re-arranged and expressed in different ways. For example you can express “conservation of total momentum” as “the velocity of the center of mass never changes”.
A good physicist (one who pick their words carefully) will avoid saying that one thing or another is “true”. Physics, and the laws we come up with, don’t exist “out there somewhere”. Boiled down to its most basic, what we study is “what has worked before, and still seems to work” as opposed to “what is true”.
For example: Einstein showed that Newtonian physics is wrong (so wrong), but it still “works”. If you learn Newton’s stuff you’ll notice that it’s fairly intuitive (compared to some other sciences at least), and seems to be true. It was taught as fact for over 200 years, but again: wrong. Taking this, and dozens of other similar stories as a warning, physicists try to talk only about what works and not what’s true.
That being said, some of the laws that have been found may actually be true, written into the nature of the universe. I’d like to say that we know at least a few of them for sure, and that if what we know is wrong then the universe is entirely fucked. However, that has been exactly the case before (I’m looking at you wave-particle duality), so who knows?
The pitiable population of "Monopoly". Are the rules they perceive the same as the rules written on the box? They could pass Go forever, and never know.
The laws we have could easily be special cases of the true laws (like Newtonian mechanics in relativistic mechanics), or could be merely the descriptions of the behavior created by those laws.
As far as the physical laws of the universe actually, physically existing in some form somewhere (this is the total extent of my understanding of Platonism): no, I don’t think there are very many scientists who think that.
In the quantum sense, things exist because we try to measure them. Do the laws of physics exist because we choose to see them? Our labels are used to measure the universe, yes? We give it a name so that we can communicate and share the idea. So just by calling it something are we creating it? What if we aren’t actually discovering anything, rather, we are creating it and it appears before our very eyes? If so, are we collectively engaged in this construction of reality? What would it take for the whole world to agree to think up a completely eutopian planet? Is such a thing possible ever / in our lifetime?
I think about gravity. Why does it exist? more mass = more gravitational pull but why is that constant throughout the universe? as if it were programmed or written?
In quantum theory things still exist whether or not we measure them. The only difference is that unmeasured things have the option of being in more than one state at once (there’s presently a handsome youtube video that covers this fairly well).
If the laws of physics were observer dependent, then you’d expect them to have changed throughout history, and that extremely unpopular theories wouldn’t work (I’m looking at you, Relativity). But that doesn’t seem to be the case.
There’s obviously a correlation between the laws of the universe and the laws we know and observe. However, the cause and effect arrow only points in the one direction.
That being said, convincing the entire world to “think peace” seems pretty worthwhile anyway.
The Truth is eternal. The Truth is God. God exist throughout the universe in every law and in every sub atomic particle. We discovered the laws of nature (Physics, chemistry, math, etc … Love also) and we named the laws after the people that discovered them, but those laws had been in the universe before solid was created. Every Truth in the universe makes up the perfect mind of God so God is the answer to every logical question. God does not have a solid body, he is not Jesus Christ (Jesus is his son) God is a spirit. His universe is in a spiritual realm just like the laws of nature are now. We can not get into the spiritual realm (Thank God) so we have no control over the laws. 1+1=2 long before any two solid object were there to count. Distance was also present but nothing solid to measure between. The laws of Truth are eternal, the laws are God.
Before the 1st physicist or mathematician was born , Nature existed already. There was gravity , energy ,…all these phenomenon were behaving to some point inside this universe of ours….when we came to this universe , we saw this behaviours and ask Why. We dig deeper and found only a couple of explanations that are not complete and we until now continue to be doubtful even on the latest explanation we know. If we question , how these behaviours come to be , I dont know , but what I do know that it was not a results of a mathematician or physicist thinking. But , in the back on my head , I do believe that Man was not the 1st mathematician and physicist in this universe….whom Paul Dirac attributed to be the Mathematician who created the universe…( ” One could perhaps described the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order , and He used very high-order advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.- The Evolution of the Physicist’s Picture of Nature , Scientific American ) …. though Dirac’s idea about a higher mathematician is doubtful to many …what is so far true is that we don’t have yet the GUT and will never be able to know and provide a complete explanation of Nature ( cf Ecclesiates 3:11 )