What If The Universe Is Math?

That cat was like, "you've got 30 seconds, make it count".

I love how Matt rushes through the intro, waiting - like a ticking countdown - for the cat to be getting out of there.

This reminds me of a video about a Greek cult that was devoted to numbers and math. Supposedly, their motto was "All is Number" and they believed that Math was the language of everything and that it was always perfect. Then, one day, Hippasus decided to take the square root of 2 and discovered an irrational number. Then, he was either exiled or killed for it. Which taught me an important lesson: don't join any math-based cults.

This channel consistently puts out some of the best science content on Youtube. Gotta love PBS.

I feel a great sense of joy at the fact that this video on a mathematical universe is... at time of writing... number 42 on trending. If only we knew what the question was

0:26 I love how the cat kind of freaks out when realizes his body could be made entirely of equations

Kudos to the graphics team for convincingly recreating the TI calculator from my childhood.

I've been here for about 5 or 6 years. I think this is one of my favourite videos yet. Very grateful thanks for the content.

That would explain why I seem to be so bad at dealing with it. Very compelling.

Love that the channel doesn’t seem to shy away from more philosophical topics. Didn’t expect you guys to be talking about Neoplatonism but it’s interesting to hear a physicist’s perspective

Great video as usual, thanks! I haven't read Tegmark's book, but I did read a summary paper or something by him years ago. I'd just like to comment on the issue of testability. The biggest problem for me with the mathematical hypothesis is the idea that the "baggage" is baggage. The baggage is not basically about how we connect mathematical expressions to human "perspectives," but how we connect them to human _perception_. Without some of that baggage, these strings of symbols clearly don't say anything about the physical world. The empirical content of a fundamental law may come from a higher-level law (or empirical regularity) that supposedly reduces to that fundamental law, but it has to come from _somewhere_, for it to be a statement about the world. So, the mathematical hypothesis is in principle untestable as long as it insists on getting rid of the "baggage." And if it is recognized that we need a translation from the mathematical expressions to outcomes of measurement operations (we need some baggage), then I think that robs the hypothesis of most of its novelty. We're left with some kind of mathematical realism.

This show is so good. Great job explaining the different points of view and their consequences.

I love that when the cat is confronted with being a mathematical object, it immediately tries to escape Matt.

0:50 To the Editor of this video: The little things you do, like making the text flicker as though it were an old analog television we were watching this on, it's really just the Chef's Kiss of your talents. You add imperceptible quality to these videos, and as thankless as the job is, know you are appreciated. Thank you, mysterious stranger!

It was rather fun seeing all the ideas from my Computer Science Degree again.

One of my favorite channels on all of YT. Accessible (enough lol) yet very intellectually rigorous. Makes me feel like I am just barely keeping up, on the (exhilarating) razor's edge of learning. Great stuff.

The level of reality where physics and philosophy intersect is fascinating to me. Always happy to see more videos like this.

Amazing. This is my favourite kind of math... Philosophy.

OMG, I'm so glad you mentioned it - thought I might be suffering from Dunning-Kruger when your basic description immediately reminded me of incompleteness and the halting problem.

I have a small but critical correction. Undecidable problems are not "neither true nor false". They are claims that are either true or false but where it can be proven that no algorithm can necessarily determine if the claim is true or false. In the halting problem, for example, it is proven that no algorithm can be written that will always determine if a given program will ever stop. The program in question will stop or never stop, but we can not know which of the cases will happen with by executing an algorithm.