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Description edit
Steven E. Landsburg is a Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester. He is the author of More Sex Is Safer Sex, The Armchair Economist, Fair Play, two textbooks on economics, and over thirty journal articles in mathematics, economics, and philosophy. He writes the popular... read more
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit
Quotes edit
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“I believe the Universe is made of mathematics, but there is no lack of alternative theories. For some odd reason, the most durable of these - those with names like Judaism, Christianity and Islam - seem the ones devised by illiterate shepherds”
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“But a choice is not a choice unless you could have chosen differently, which suggests that, for example, God could have arrange matters so that two plus two makes five. And at least in my experience, even people who claim to be very religious have trouble swallowing <i>that</i> much omnipotence”
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“The leaders of the Intelligent Design movement have consistently and adamantly denied that the Intelligent Designer must be God. Presumably this so they can divorce their argument from religion and sneak it into public school classrooms. But the denial is untenable. Once you argue that irreducible complexity implies a designer, you're forced to conclude that arithmetic itself, no less than the physical Universe, required a designer. And who but God could design the very laws of arithmetic?”
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“Not even religious people believe that arithmetic was designed by God, and not even Dawkins believes that arithmetic evolved through natural selection. Therefore Dawkins and his opponents are equally wrong”
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“You can't call a thing into existence simply by defining it”
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“Anselm's argument suffers not from being a word game, but from being <i>wrong</i>”
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“there are other arguments for God's existence, but they all strike me as too silly to mention”
- Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
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But without the baggage, all that’s left is the math. So math must be the fabric of the Universe.
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The “beliefs” I echo are those I might want to believe, or those I’m trying to talk myself into, or those that I’m trying on for size. But when I pass the threshold to actual belief, I stop reviewing the matter.
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A Universe physically exists if its inhabitants know it’s there.
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The only way to be sure you’re telling a logical, coherent story is to translate your story into mathematics and to simplify it down to the point where you can calculate all its implications. That’s exactly what a model is.
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Argue passionately for your beliefs; listen intently to your adversaries, and root for yourself to lose. When you lose, you’ve learned something.
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Our predictions are not, and never will be, based on models; they’re based on informal reasoning. We study models because they hone our reasoning skills. We can figure out what happens in those models and thereby develop a good intuitive feeling for what sorts of reasoning are likely to be productive.
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But I think it’s generally good policy to assume that things have causes. They often do, and even when they don’t, you generally learn more by looking for nonexistent causes than by refusing to look for existent ones.
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Google for “Aumann” plus “agreeing to disagree.”)
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Max Tegmark (a cosmologist at MIT) called “The Mathematical Universe,” which was recently published in the journal Foundations of Physics.
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“Huygens’s Principle.” The bottom line is this: The surface of a pond is two-dimensional. The air is three-dimensional. A disturbance creates ripples when the number of dimensions is even; it creates a single wave—without ripples—when the number of dimensions is odd.
Highlighted by 7 Kindle customers
Setting & Locations edit
First Sentence edit
Why is there something instead of nothing?
Authors & Contributors edit
- Steven E. Landsburg (Author)
First Edition edit
Original Language: English
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd.
Country: UK
Publication Date: 2010
ISBN: 978-1-84739-916-8
Page Count: 267
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd.
Country: UK
Publication Date: 2010
ISBN: 978-1-84739-916-8
Page Count: 267
Classification edit
- Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
- Dewey: 100
Subjects edit
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