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i'm not commenting on the validity of what you say, just that it reminds me of the story of max plank and his photon 'hack' for getting round the ultraviolet catastrophe - he thought it was a mathematical tick/curiosity too. then Einstein said 'hang on hang on hang on, maybe not...'. wouldn't be the first time in history a hack turned out to be the real deal.

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There are a lot of mathematical things like that - tachyons for example are a mathematical "solution".

The ultraviolet example is the opposite: The universe acted in a certain way, so we looked for math to match, which happened to have a strange property to it.

Here first we found the strong property and are looking for the universe to match.

You can do the first, but not the second.

Well of course we can do the second. It has happened all the way with the element table in chemistry. Heck we're even manufacturing non-natural matter (as in, probably never generated elsewhere in the universe) to fill the holes that the theory has created.

The Higgs boson also comes to mind.

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