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Comment by ants_everywhere | Hacker News Reader

> Mathematics is a description, not a prescription.

But are you sure about this? If mathematics were not prescriptive then we should expect to see some evidence of that. So far nobody has demonstrated the existence of phenomena that contradicts the equations of physics. Usually we would call such phenomena "supernatural."

It's possible in theory that nature doesn't have to obey mathematical laws. But if there's no evidence for it and if it doesn't explain any phenomena, then what is the argument for holding that particular belief?

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Physics doesn’t obey mathematical laws. Mankind studied physics until we found mathematical formulas that describe nature reliably. There are countless math formulas that were discarded over the millennia after they were discovered to not adequately describe the physical phenomena they were intended to describe.

Math is a collection of abstractions. Some are useful in explaining natural phenomena. Some are not.

> So far nobody has demonstrated the existence of phenomena that contradicts the equations of physics. Usually we would call such phenomena "supernatural."

You cannot contradict a description; it's not a "law" in the legal/prescriptive sense.

How would you even "contradict the equations of physics"? The real world exists and it's there; we use models to imperfectly describe (to varying degrees of success) its phenomena. In a sense, the real world contradicts those equations because they do not perfectly describe it; they are just an approximation.

> So far nobody has demonstrated the existence of phenomena that contradicts the equations of physics.

That's kind of a tautology because physics is rules for what we observe. If we observe something contradicting the rules then we come up with new rules to describe the new thing.

The most straightforward evidence that mathematics is descriptive and not prescriptive is Einstein's General Relativity which illuminated that Newtonian mechanics was not prescriptive. Similarly General Relativity does not prescribe what happens at quantum scales.

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