Do We Live Inside a Mathematical Equation?

Feb. 16, 2013 , 4:03 PM

BOSTON—From the arc of a baseball to the orbits of the planets, mathematical patterns are
everywhere. But according to physicist Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in Cambridge, it’s not enough to say that math governs our universe. Rather, he
believes that reality itself is a mathematical structure. What the heck does that mean? We
caught up with Tegmark after his presentation at yesterday's symposium "Is Beauty Truth?"
at the annual meeting of AAAS (which publishes ScienceNOW).

Q: What makes a mathematical theory beautiful?

M.T.: For me, it’s usually when there’s an unexpected connection between two things I
thought were unrelated. Imagine if you walked into an art museum and saw a very beautiful
sculpture in one corner, and something else in the other corner, but there’s a big veil between
them. And then suddenly someone lifts the veil and you see that the two things are just parts
of a much grander structure. Seeing that whole makes you understand the pieces much
better.

The beautiful mathematical regularities that have been uncovered have typically been
unifications, where instead of having one mathematical description for this and a different one
for that, we realize there’s a single mathematical structure that encompasses all of it. So for
me, it would be a natural conclusion if everything could be unified, if there’s a single
mathematical structure that is our reality, and all of the mathematical structures that we’ve
discovered before are part of this more beautiful whole.

Q: Wait a minute. What do you mean, the universe is a mathematical structure?

M.T.: So right now, I’m eating an orange, which is made of cells. Why do they have the
properties they do? Well, because they’re made of molecules. Why do the molecules have
their properties? Because they’re made of atoms put together in a certain way. Why do the
atoms have those properties? Because they’re made of quarks and electrons. What about the
electron? What properties does it have? And the cool thing is, all the properties that electrons
have are purely mathematical. It’s just a list of numbers. So in that sense, an electron is a
purely mathematical object. In fact, there’s no evidence right now that there’s anything at all in
our universe that is not mathematical.

Q: You call this idea the mathematical universe hypothesis and say it’s a fundamentally
optimistic way of looking at reality. Why?
M.T.: We’ve discovered again and again that reality is bigger than we thought. People were
really shocked to realize how big Earth was. Then they were shocked by how big our solar
system was, and how far away the stars were, and that we were just a small part of this
galaxy, which is one out of gazillions of others. Now there’s a lot of fuss about our whole
observable universe just being part of a much bigger space, with lots of parallel quantum
realities.

If there are parts of reality that we can’t observe with our telescopes or travel to with our
rockets, some people might feel it’s a bit of a bummer, that we’re fundamentally limited in
what we can observe. But there’s a cool twist here. If the mathematical universe hypothesis is
true, we can actually learn things about the parts of our universe we can’t see or visit. Not
with a telescope but with a pencil—and a lot of ingenuity.

Plus, if the mathematical universe hypothesis is false, that means that the future of physics is
ultimately doomed. We’re ultimately going to hit a roadblock beyond which we just cannot
proceed. Whereas if I’m right, there is no roadblock. The road ahead is open, and our future
understanding is really only limited by our imagination.

Q: I'm not a mathematician. Why should I believe your theory?

M.T.: We should believe scientific theories if they make predictions that can be tested, and
possibly proved wrong. Some people argue that, well, if there’s a theory that predicts a bunch
of stuff that you can never observe, that’s not science. But that’s actually an incorrect
viewpoint. For a theory to be falsifiable, we don’t have to be able to observe everything that it
predicts. Just at least one thing. And if that prediction is wrong, flush the theory down the
toilet.

Gravity is a great example. Einstein’s theory of gravity predicts exactly what happens inside of
black holes. Should we dismiss that as philosophical blah blah blah? No! Because this theory
also predicts exactly the time delays of the GPS satellites. And if Einstein were wrong, we
would get totally lost when driving around in our cars these days. Because it’s so successful
in the things that it predicted that we could test, we were forced to take seriously its other
predictions as well.