Darren Hopes
THEY call it the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics”. Physicist Eugene Wigner coined the phrase in the 1960s to encapsulate the curious fact that merely by manipulating numbers we can describe and predict all manner of natural phenomena with astonishing clarity, from the movements of planets and the strange behaviour of fundamental particles to the consequences of a collision between two black holes billions of light years away. Now, some are wondering if maths can succeed where all else has failed, unravelling whatever it is that allows us to contemplate the laws of nature in the first place.
It is a…
Article amended on 4 May 2020
Correction: We have updated the campus of Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences at which Hedda Hassel Mørch is based, and changed the attribution of work on the effects of sleep or sedation on phi.
