#unreasonable effectiveness

[qwertystop]

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Being Earnest

I was trying to remember where "unreasonable effectiveness" came from, and got a bit confused. It makes for an interesting idea, though. Which of the influences do people read more strongly from it?

Does this title belong to:

A play, or similar fiction

An academic paper, or similar nonfiction

Something else (please reply)

genuine vanilla extract

Voting ended onMar 20

For reference:

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

What did you have for dinner?

Well, I had some of those "super-cured" tuna that get sold on the internet. It was good, although not as good as the kind I can get at Trader Joe's.

My main food for dinner was a piece of cake on my desk, because my office doesn't really have an oven. My office does have a refrigerator, and I used that to store the piece of cake I'd saved for an unknown length of time. (The fact that I had the refrigerator was a point of pride in my office, as one of the few things I get for free in this job.)

[jadagul]

@91625 said (here): Psychology involves things which change their behavior when studied.

Sure. And physics doesn't. The "unreasonable effectiveness" point is that it's really convenient that physics doesn't.

There are all sorts of things that don't behave with obvious, simple, and easy-to-find mathematical regularities. Physics mostly does. This is convenient, and surprising.

[unqb]

Eugene Wigner wrote a famous essay on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences. He meant physics, of course. There is only one thing which is more unreasonable than the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and this is the unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in biology.

— Israel Gelfand

[unqb]

Fascinating paper by Eugene Wigner published in 1960 that raises a number of baffling questions, not the least of which is 'why do our theories work so well?' Specifically, why is it that mathematics — a product of human thought seemingly independent of experience — provides such an accurate description of physics — the study of matter and its motion in space-time aka the real world?