The Unbelievable Effectiveness of Mathematics in Our Universe, Right?

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Maths is a mama creation, right? And yet it's doing this amazing job of describing the universe. The universe will definitely, something terrible is going to happen to the universe before that number is ever conceived. But at the same time, there's the question of we have our universe and yet maths has this uncanny ability to describe it. I'd say the flip side though is there is an unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in our universe.

It’s a big universe we live in, so it comes as no surprise that big numbers are needed to describe it. There are roughly 10^22 stars in the observable universe, and about 10^88 particles altogether. But these numbers are nothing compared to some of the truly ginormous quantities that mathematicians have found to talk about, with inscrutable names like Graham’s Number and TREE(3). Could such immense numbers have any meaningful relationship with the physical world? In his recent book Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them, theoretical physicist Antonio Padilla explores both our actual universe and the abstract world of immense numbers, and finds surprising connections between them.

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Antonio (Tony) Padilla received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Durham. He is currently a Royal Society Research Fellow in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nottingham. He is a frequent contributor to the YouTube series Sixty Symbols and Numberphile.

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