The Du Sautoy Code

Professor Marcus du Sautoy








Most people know very little about Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans other than the Pythagorean Theorem of the triangle, which was attributed to Pythagoras, but was most certainly known and used for well over 1000 years before Pythagoras lived. Pity. Bertrand Russell, the twentieth century mathematician and philosopher, whilst unsympathetic to Pythagoras, stated,


Not someone we should have forgotten about, then.

Pythagoras and his followers believed that all relations could be reduced to number relations, that mathematics (holos) is the real reality, while the world (cosmos) is a construct of our minds. The Pythagorean ontology was that ‘The Essence of Being Is Number’, number being understood to be ‘that which prior to all things subsists…by which and from which all things are coordinated, and remain connumerated in an indissoluble order.’ (Christians will notice a usurpation of the divine Logos therein). The Pythagorean philosophy was dominated by the ideal that numbers were not merely symbols of reality, but were the final substance of real things.

Aristotle fleshes this out in his Metaphysics, where he states that the Pythagoreans

…believed that the principles of mathematics were also the principles of all things that be. Now, since the principles of mathematics are numbers, and they thought they found in numbers, more than in fire and earth and water, similarities with things that are and that become (they judged, for example, that justice was a particular property of numbers, the soul and mind another, opportunity another, and similarly, so to say, anything else), and since furthermore they saw expressed by numbers the properties and the ratios of harmony, since finally everything in nature appeared to them to be similar to numbers, and numbers appeared to be first among all there is in nature, they thought that the elements of numbers were the elements of all that there is, and that the whole world was harmony and number.

Jetting around the world, the place Du Sautoy starts the programme is Chartres cathedral, the first of the great French Gothic cathedrals. The association is not lost on us. In the Middle Ages the cathedral school at Chartres was the centre for revival and development of Pythagorean ideas, and there is even a sculpture of Pythagoras in the cathedral. The cathedral was built on the site of a Druid temple, the crypt beneath the cathedral being a dolmenic chamber. Diodorus Siculus, writing in 36 BC, describes how these Druids followed Pythagorean teachings, and it is today one of the main centres for those interested in the Knights Templar, Freemasonry, the Lost Ark, the Holy Grail, bloodlines and all that baggage. The cathedral contains a mass of Masonic, gnostic, pagan, astrological and Pythagorean symbols. In Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, his fictional character Robert Langdon lectures on the pagan symbolism of Chartres cathedral. Starting the TV series here is a dead giveaway.

At least the masters of Chartres tried to ‘Christianize’ some of the ideas and put them to some use in theology, hence as Otto von Simson (The Gothic Cathedral, Harper & Row, New York, 1956) states,

The masters of Chartres, like the…Pythagoreans of all ages, were obsessed with mathematics: it was considered the link between God and the world, the magical tool that would unlock the secrets of both.

David J. Stucki remarks

…from the dawn of Western Civilization and through the Middle Ages the heart of mathematics was strongly tied to religious thought. Eventually, however, the humanism of the Renaissance and the empiricism of the Scientific Revolution began to open the door for the breakdown of this marriage. Scientism, the granting of absolute authority to the empirical and objective, became the mistress of the modern mind. The resulting ‘mathematization’ of science and culture (Howell & Bradley, 2001) had a myriad of consequences. The Church was no longer perceived as having a monopoly on Truth. The success of mathematics in accounting for the structure and behavior of the physical universe ultimately led to a naturalistic version of the Pythagorean ontology that ‘Everything is number.’ The divorce of theology and mathematics in the modern age created the 20th century crisis of ‘Foundationalism’ in mathematical philosophy…[and] epistemological progress in mathematics is devastating to Christian theology under the Pythagorean legacy.

Clearly the Pythagoreans are still around; Du Sautoy for one, but also an increasing number of physicists are being seduced into thinking that ‘the principles of mathematics are also the principles of all things that be’, that somehow mathematics is primary reality.

For example, I. V. Volovich, CERN physicist, in his paper Number theory as the ultimate physical theory concludes that

the fundamental entities of which we consider our Universe to be composed cannot be particles, fields or strings but numbers.

Others have dived into the deep end, for example Vasilios Gardiakos:

That ‘all is number’ will allow us to create what many theologians thought only God was capable of…all can be numerated and computerized…Mathematics is the most basic requirement for existence. It has no mass, dimension and time and yet it can create these and many more phenomena.

The Thales era which brought us science is near the end. It is to be followed by the Pythagorean era with…the realization that ‘all is number’…we will gain the vision that ‘all is mathematics’…This is the point that we begin to perceive our existence as numerical.

The philosophy of mathematics is a contentious issue. It explores, but never resolves (apart from theology), the debates between the Platonists and the Formalists, the Realists and the Nominalists. The Pythagoreans aim to cut through the debate by making both views redundant through asserting a radical third way, which aims to dominate the whole scientific enterprise.

Platonists/Realists believe that mathematical entities exist independently of the human mind, declaring the existence of an abstract and immutable world apart from this material universe in which absolute mathematical truths reside. In this view, mathematicians do not create mathematics but discover it. But if these entities are not part of this universe, how can they be discovered and recognized? The standard answer to that it is by intuition or divine revelation and illumination, which are not attractive to atheists. Christians might be attracted to such a view, in that such entities ‘exist’ in the mind of God, (or somehow in God himself, who is transcendently not part of this universe, and yet immanent within it, though there is an ever-present danger of lapsing into panentheism when applying this to the created universe). St Augustine was generally Platonist in such things.

Formalists/Nominalists on the other hand deny the existence of mathematical entities, making mathematics a construction of the mind (whether the mind of man or the mind of God). In this view, mathematics is a very useful common language and tool that can help us try to make sense of the world, and can lead us into some very fruitful lines of enquiry, but which is nonetheless conventional rather than real. Augustine interestingly had some thoughts along these lines as well, that numbers are the universal language conveyed by God to us as confirmation of the truth.

Whereas Realists and Nominalists are agreed that there are no mathematical entities within this universe, the Pythagoreans assert that mathematical entities are not only within the universe, but actually comprise the universe: this is attractive to reductionist atheists. In summary:

Realism: asserts that mathematical entities exist outside the reality of the universe. The connexion, if any, between these entities and reality is a debatable issue.

Nominalism: asserts that there are no mathematical entities; mathematics is a product of the mind apart from reality.

Pythagoreanism: asserts that there are mathematical entities within the universe, which constitute the whole of reality: all else is a product of the mind.

We will explore the development of these philosophical concepts in subsequent posts, but suffice for now to say that Marcus du Sautoy’s Pythagoreanism (or Neopythagoreanism) is in no way representative of the mathematics or physics community at large, and it is disingenuous that the BBC are promoting what amounts to a religious view under cover of a programme about patterns in the world.

St Augustine had said,

If you see anything at all that has measure, number, and order, do not hesitate to attribute it to God as craftsman.

Just imagine the howls of disapproval, and the threats by the New Atheists, if this TV series had introduced a subtext of Intelligent Design underlying the patterns and numbers highlighted!


21 Responses to “The Du Sautoy Code”

  1. 1 Oliver K. Manuel August 2, 2011 at 3:45 am

    Mathematics is one of many important ways of experiencing the Great Reality that surrounds and sustains us. But there are many others.

    The Great Reality, that is sometimes called Bountiful Earth, Cosmos, God, Higher Power, Truth, Universe Is also revealed by cause and effect, coincidence, destiny, experimentation, fate, insight, karma, meditation, observation, prayer, providence, serendipity, sight (beauty), sound (music), and unmerited acts of human kindness (love and compassion).

    Professor Marcus du Sautoy apparently experienced the Great Reality through mathematics. His findings in no way diminish the findings of those who experienced the Great Reality by other means.

    With kind regards,
    Oliver K. Manuel
    Former NASA Principal
    Investigator for Apollo

    ScientistForTruth responds

    It is true that we all experience something of truth and illumination. In Christianity the divine Logos is ‘the true Light, which lightens every man that comes in to the world’. One would hope that since Professor Du Sautoy is married to a Jewess then he would come into contact with aspects of divine revelation in the Tanakh, but hopefully not be drawn aside into gematria and Kabbalah.

  2. 2 Ocarinajohn August 2, 2011 at 9:46 am

    As neither a Christian nor an atheist, I applaud your deep analysis of these issues. In his own time, Pythagoras was eventually recognised as an enemy of humanity, and eliminated for the public good. Du Sautoy invites a similar response, but will be promoted by the BBC and other anti-human authorities who hold and mould the mass-mind of this, our present day dystopia.

  3. 3 MattM August 4, 2011 at 1:44 pm

    If I’ve read your article correctly, you are hostile to du Sautoy because his programme is somehow anti-Christian. Could you please quote the exact words from the broadcast where he attacks Christianity, as I managed to miss this.
    Many thanks

    ScientistForTruth responds

    I think you may have got a slightly different angle from the post from what was intended. I am pointing out that mathematicians tend to fall into two camps, Realists and Nominalists, neither of whom locate mathematical entities within this Universe. There is, however, a third way, which appeals to atheists, to identify mathematical entities within this universe as reality itself. This is essentially a materialistic form of Pythagoreanism, and a direction in which more and more physicists are going. Many Christians are Realists, but some are Nominalists, and I pointed out that Augustine, though strongly influenced by Neoplatonism, nevertheless has some Nominalist leanings. However, Christians cannot be Pythagoreans or Neopythagoreans as such teaching is inimical to Christian doctrine.

    Without wishing to drag this too far into medieval scholasticism where such things were discussed in a lively way, the expression of Du Sautoy that ‘The Code is the truth of the universe, and its numbers dictate the way the world must be’ is antithetical to Christian doctrine and about as close as one comes to a modern expression of Pythagoreanism.

    Here is some more that Du Sautoy says (not in the programme, but about the series):

    Can numbers define a mass of people with their own motivations and desires, all going about the business of their lives?

    The answer is yes. Mathematics is the code that controls not only our world and everything in it, but even us, a jumble of millions of individuals…Unimaginable as it may seem, we appear to have no choice over what effects we have en masse…We are even starting to unlock the human brain by viewing the neurons and synapses as points and connections in another mathematical network. It is possible that one of the deepest questions in science and philosophy – consciousness; what is it that gives me the feeling of an ‘I’ inside my head – could be the result of mathematical properties of the way our brains are wired.

    No doubt it seems reductionist to reduce the buzz of New York or the sophistication of Paris to a single number. But, if nothing else, it proves that the world we live in can ultimately be explained by numbers.

    It does not merely seem reductionist, it is reductionist. Again you have the screaming Pythagoreanism: “the world we live in can ultimately be explained by numbers”. Note: mathematics controls, explains, determines etc. Even consciousness is reduced to numbers. “Mathematics…controls…our world and everything in it…even us.” As I say in the post


  4. 4 Marquis Du Sauté August 6, 2011 at 9:14 am

    I enjoyed your post very much; my thoughts after watching ‘The Code’ were very similar, but you expressed them in a more complete and scholarly way than I could have.

    It seems I am very much a ‘nominalist’, believing mathematics to be a reflection of the human intellect and our perceptions of reality, rather than inherent in reality itself, as Du Sautoy claims.

    Reading your post has shifted my thoughts from simply scoffing at a Prof who doesn’t understand what mathematics is, to considering how a Nominalist might justify their position to a Realist, so thank you.

    ScientistForTruth responds

    Thanks for your encouragement. As I mentioned in the post, I intend in subsequent posts to deal in greater detail with views of the connexion between mathematics and reality, especially looking at the positions staked out in the last 100 years or so, and how they have been disproved. There has been some really hard work in the Nominalist camp (logicism, formalism and intuitionism), but also some spectacular disproofs of those positions.

    Mathematics has undoubtedly been such a fruitful tool that there have always been some who have identified reality as being essentially mathematical: the Pythagorean view, helped along by Galileo, Newton etc, and now espoused by many physicists. We will show that this position was delivered a fatal blow also in the twentieth century.

  5. 5 Richard M August 7, 2011 at 2:17 pm

    You say “this is attractive to materialist reductionist atheists”. And: “This is essentially a materialistic form of Pythagoreanism, and a direction in which more and more physicists are going”

    I get that it is “reductionist” (perhaps) – but not that it is “materialist” (without changing the meaning of the term materialist?).

    What strikes me about Du Sautoy is that his realism seems to be an odd bedfellow for atheism. I even wonder if he has really thought that through?

    ScientistForTruth responds

    The meaning of ‘materialist’ has indeed changed over the last 100 years with the development of quantum theories and the understanding that ‘matter’ is not made up of atoms that are like billiard balls, and with the understanding of the relationship between matter and energy. I have removed the word, though, to avoid misunderstanding. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

    If we had no choice but to pigeonhole Du Sautoy into one of two camps, Nominalist and Realist, then we would be obliged to put him down as a Realist, but his effectively Pythagorean views set him apart from most expressions of Realism. His belief that consciousness is ‘the result of mathematical properties’ certainly militates against Nominalism.

    Du Sautoy says ‘Mathematics is the code that controls not only our world and everything in it, but even us…we appear to have no choice…the world we live in can ultimately be explained by numbers’. Here is ‘The Code’ again in the guise of an entity that has ultimate control of everything, has ultimate explanatory power and which (as he expresses elsewhere) is ultimate reality. It is, as you say, a somewhat strange concomitant to atheism, since he is effectively deifying ‘The Code’ just as the Pythagorean sect did in the ancient world.

  6. 6 Charlie Mitton August 8, 2011 at 11:09 am

    Rupert Sheldrake wrote that, as regards the genetic code, what is implied is a computer analogy. Computers are programmed by intelligent beings and the code itself could not have evolved. As there is no intelligent source one must assume that it is then a self organizing computer and as none exists, then the computer analogy breaks down. This problem is also reflected in du Sautoy’s ‘mysterious entity’. He ultimately though implies that numbers are somehow transcendental of normal logic.There is no philosophical resolution of this.

  7. 7 DJM August 12, 2011 at 8:59 pm

    Some of your points are serious and well made, but your position is undermined by your vitriol. So what if Du Sautoy isn’t a Christian, so what if his brand of determinism is materialistic and doesn’t rely on some “spiritual substance” (Hobbes already showed the nonsensical nature of this type of language centuries ago).
    I take issue with you when, in response to Du Sautoy saying “I do not know of any other man who has been as influential as he was in the sphere of thought.”, you say “Not someone we should have forgotten about, then.” Pythagoras could be important in the sense Du Sautoy means even though his name be forgotten, after all, Du Sautoy is talking about “influence” not “fame”. In any case, everyone I know is familiar with the name “Pythagoras”, so even in the “fame” stakes he seems to be doing rather well.

    ScientistForTruth responds

    I’m not quoting Du Sautoy on the influence of Pythagoras but Bertrand Russell, as stated in the post. I believe Russell was right – Pythagoras was highly influential, but the consciousness of his influence is practically unknown, with the average person only knowing a theorem named after him. He is someone whose influence we should not have forgotten about, as I said.

    Likewise, the average viewer of the BBC series would probably miss the metaphysical and religious underpinnings to what Du Sautoy is saying, thinking this was just a series about patterns in nature, or for those who are proponents of ID, that this in some way supports their view (when, in fact, Du Sautoy has a very different view). Hence this post. That hopefully goes some way to answering your ‘So what?’ question. It may not be of importance to you, but it may be illuminating to others.

    I don’t know what you mean by ‘spiritual substance’, which is not a term I’ve introduced.

    In the wider context, the idea that reality is, at bottom, number (or some entity such as ‘The Code’) is, I believe, a dangerous idea, which has been wreaking havoc in physics and other branches of science for decades. There is a world of difference between saying that certain aspects of reality (geometry, relationships, dynamics etc) can be expressed mathematically, and saying that reality itself is number, and attributing to number all explanatory power. That’s the Pythagorean religious cult’s idea. Du Sautoy clearly knows that – on his DVD boxed set of an earlier series ‘The Story of Maths’ there is a bundled 20-page booklet about this cult.

    I see Leo Robson of the Financial Times has seen through some of this in his article The Big Idea isn’t always best: Facts are preferred to speculative thinking, information to interpretation, explaining to expounding in which he writes

    …the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy is in danger of becoming what Simonyi called a “populariser”. His latest series, The Code (BBC2 Wednesdays), represents one strand of PSB [Public Service Broadcasting]: the attempt to explain everything with one Big Idea…In this case, it enabled Du Sautoy to talk, in part Malcolm Gladwell, part Dan Brown fashion, as if he holds a key that unlocks everything…

    In any television week, Du Sautoy on “the code” would seem flimsy as public service or commercial entertainment…[two alternative programmes] taught more science by taking on a smaller subject. Both used a sober and patient narrator rather than an irrepressible and continent-hopping presenter…[and another] also showed that the revelation of “secrets” can expand the viewer’s sense of things and satisfy their thirst for understanding without, like Du Sautoy, attempting to quench it altogether.

  8. 8 Charlie Mitton September 11, 2011 at 1:57 pm

    Clearly what is at issue here is where the numbers at the basis of everything came from. There is an implication that they may have been put there by God but du Sautoy remains a clear atheist. I am interested in a different code. Robert Anton Wilson had the peculiar idea that the number 23 somehow signified significant events and coincidences. This derives from a coincidence concerning two pilots deriving from Beat writer William Burroughs. Exactly a decade after the twin towers attacks I would like to point out a possibly meaningful code which seems to have evolved.
    The attacks on the towers were dated 9/11/2001, mentioned by 23 enthusiasts as adding up in its constituent parts to a 23. Today we could multiply it by the extra one and still find a 23. Two Egyptologists Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval have identified in their book Talisman dualistic traditions in history and these two seem to have attracted 23s. One of the traditions highlighted by Wilson is Sufism thought of to be the mystical side of Islam. Sometime ago I met an old friend of mine in Birmingham who was a Muslim convert. I discovered that he had written an article for the Birmingham Post about inter-faith understanding and it was dated 23rd November 2006. I later identified a book on Sufism by Idries Shah which connected Sufism with not only Greek philosophy but with the Hermetic Texts and the Egyptian god Thoth. I found that Shah had died on November 23rd 1996. Thoth was a moon god who helped out the sun god Atum when he had trouble with some over combative subsidiary gods.
    Meanwhile Bauval has written that 9/11/2001 falls on the 23rd of the month in both the Jewish and Islamic calendars. Firstly the 11th September of the year 2001 AD (Anno Domini) is based on the Gregorian calendar. For the Islamic calendar this date fell on the 23rd Jumaada Al Thani of the year 1422 A.H. (Anno Hegira); for the Ethiopian calendar it was the 1st Meskerem of the year 7501; in the Coptic (Christian Egyptian) calendar it was the 1st Thout of the year 1725, and according to the Jewish calendar it was the 23rd Elul of the year 5761 The Ethiopian calendar coincides with the Egyptian calendar which also has a New Years Day coincident with 9/11. It is called the first ‘Thout.’ This oddly recalls Thoth who himself had a calendar named after him and it coincided with the heliacal rising of the star Sirius. The New Years Day falls on July 23rd. The rising of Sirius as Hancock has observed, coincidentally, has 365 days, and just fits our year divided by four seasons. Sirius meanwhile has a B star which spins 23 times on its own axis and itself has a luminosity of 23 suns. It has a mass of 2.3 suns and it corresponds with the rising of the Nile by 23ft. in the Cairo area.
    Meanwhile I had a friend called Lucia who told me that her son was in search of the Holy Grail. His name is Lucien Hardy and his project is the union of quantum mechanics and general relativity – the very large and the very small. What’s more she reminded me that I had met him at a house numbered 23. Bauval has said that the terrorists’ aim was an attack on Freemasonry but Shah also connects Freemasonry with Sufism and the former is another of those dualistic traditions which spits out 23s in Talisman.
    What’s increasingly odd though is the fact that quantum theorist David Bohm has spoken of an intelligence in nature and a super-implicate order where we might identify the origins of both mind and matter. What’s more it is called a pilot-wave theory and oddly the original 23 concerns two pilots. The 23s then appear to be what has been called a transcendental signifier. It would be then easy to assume that the wave of 23s is trying to pass a message from this super-implicate intelligence. In du Sautoy’s analysis there is not a clear enough picture of why and how the numbers are the basis of everything and how they get there. In Robert Anton Wilson’s analysis however we may have a theory of everything, which links science, literature, religion and the whole shebang.

    ScientistForTruth replies

    Hard to take any of this seriously especially when the units or datums are arbitrary, e.g. 23.5 degrees, 23 ft, calendars etc.

  9. 9 John Carless September 12, 2011 at 12:05 pm

    There seems to be something of a trend which promotes continent-hopping presenters in science. Another is blue-eyed boy Brian Cox. He is promoted by reference to his past as a rock star. He is telegenic and is now flaunting himself on quiz shows. He gets referenced by ‘brainy’ people like Stephen Fry but is at the end of the day peddling conventional reductionist parameters. He stares doe-eyed at the universe in awe. He must have learnt that even staring through telescopes can be boring and if he was in the middle of all these cosmological regurgitations he might find it all a bit scary. I agree that a more sober approach which takes on board the type of inductional questions which philosopher Christopher Norris contends are also not confronted by the likes of Hawking.

  10. 10 Charlie Mitton September 16, 2011 at 9:15 am

    Firstly I would like to say how much I agree with Mr. Carless that people like Cox who exploit the fact that the media is not, it seems, even aware that there are scientists who ask foundational questions. Bell’s Theorem and subsequent experiments to demonstrate it have shown that particles can influence each other instantaneously and therefore faster than the speed of light. This contests Einsteinian limits for a start. Philosophical questions also which critique the assumptions of both general relativity and quantum theory are ignored since they do not involve large mechanical spaces. Rupert Sheldrake was on TV sometime ago on a programme about biologist Tim Hunt winning the Nobel Prize for work on cell formation. Sheldrake said that he had won it for his contribution to reductionist science. The BBC clearly had no idea that Sheldrake was a critic of overly reductionist and mechanistic science.
    Secondly in reply to SFT’s assertion in connection with my prior posting that the datums are ‘arbitrary’ causes us to look at the meaning of the term which is assumed to be pejorative.
    The dictionary definition suggests ‘random’, ‘chance’ or ‘capricious’ on the one hand but ‘decided by an arbiter’ on the other. An arbiter is a referee basically and we employ these to ‘arbitrate’ at sports events on the assumption that they act intelligently. Trade disputes similarly may go to arbitration. In reply to the first definition, it may be the whole point that they are random or chance because that suggests acausality. The question then is whether there is an acausal connecting principle in nature as suggested by Carl Jung and quantum theorist Wolfgang Pauli and which is supported by other thinkers but which is roundly ignored by conventional science and the media. Even the capriciousness of 23.5 or slight permutations may be relevant for acausality especially since Wilson also has written of a ‘law of five.’ In fact all of this may be indicative of some other outside force that is acting intelligently to arbitrate.
    Quantum theory is a probabilistic theory and what we seem to have in regards to these 23s are denotative signs which can be seen as analogous to particles but seem to connote a wave. This is simply a psychological fact. The question is then whether this is any more than metaphorical. The only way to answer this is to watch them pile up. Then the probability amplitude rises so that what is being witnessed is meaningful and therefore a real phenomenon in the world. The context in which I place this range of 23s is only part of a system which I have already investigated and which you have no knowledge of. And so my perspective is different to yours until you know all the facts. This gap in your knowledge is nothingness. Hawking believes that that a point the size of a proton is a universe and the darkness that surrounds it is a nothingness. Similarly Richard Dawkins was on TV the other night criticizing the notion of myth and saying that we can travel north from any point on the earth and because of the curvature of the earth there is no final point or absolute beginning. Once again he chooses to ignore the darkness of the universe in which the earth is situated.
    The Egyptian creation myth (or the one stated in the Pyramid Texts of 2300BC) says that the solar god Atum-re arose out of the primordial waters of chaos to pleasure himself and give birth by generating dualities into a family of gods. Some regard this as a reasonable analogy for an archetypal view of creation. The Ancient Egyptians however continued to worship their sun god which others have associated with rationality. Even they, like Hawking and Dawkins, ignore the god of the darkness and watery chaos Nun that suggests None, nothingess or a virgin sister. We have the archetypal honouring of the male rational principle over the energy giving power of the singular event – the madness of art, magic and creativity.
    Thoth could therefore be a moon goddess and the magic lie in the acausal principle, which can only be read after the event. As I write news is coming through on TV that miners in South Wales are trapped in a chaotic watery abyss. What’s more, just as I am finishing off I find at 2.30 a.m 16th Sept. that on BBC4 Jim Al-Khalili is about to do a programme called Everything and Nothing which discusses the importance and meaning of the latter. The union of the two may just be the union of general relativity and quantum theory. What I can say is that the field is open since there is as yet no solid evidence of the Holy Grail – QUANTUM GRAVITY.

    ScientistForTruth replies

    Please be assured that my comment about the arbitrary nature of units and datums was not intended to be pejorative. My point was that the inclusion of things that are 23 ‘somethings’ undermines your argument almost fatally because the choice of the ‘somethings’ is abitrary. For example, something that is 23 feet depends on the definition of the foot, and something that is 23.5 degrees depends on the definition of a degree. The number 23 disappears if the lengths are represented in cubits or metres, or the angle in radians or gradians. The luminosity of 23 suns is a comparative measurement, but it’s not so far different from the example of 23 ft, which can be considered a comparative measurement based on a ‘standard foot’, which is an arbitrary choice adopted as a standard by convention. The 23 would disappear in your luminosity comparison if you took some other star, or some other standard as your reference candlepower. Going through your comment I didn’t find a single ’23’ that wasn’t, at root, based on something arbitrary.

    However, if I say that a system has 23 degrees of freedom, or that an equation has 23 variables, or that a certain polygon has 23 sides I should be hoping to speak in a less arbitrary way.

    As you say:


    I entirely agree: when Bell’s Inequality was tested and found to support quantum electrodynamics rather than general relativity it should have shaken the foundations of twentieth century physics. There is currently no well-accepted theory that comprehensively combines both quantum physics and general relativity, neither can there be without fundamental adjustments to one or both because for one to be upheld and the other to be disproved in repeatable experiments indicates at the very least that one of them is wrong, and most probably both of them are wrong to some degree. If you have $27k to spend you can show in a college (as there are laboratory suppliers selling kits) that general relativity fails, and there really is ‘spooky action at a distance’ (to use Einstein’s description) when two photons travelling in different directions are produced ‘simultaneously’ from the same atom.

    In 1900 Lord Kelvin gave a lecture trumpeting the achievements of the nineteenth century, declaring that classical physics had pretty much achieved a full understanding of universal physical principles, there being only two little areas that needed closing out: the problem of the (supposed) luminiferous ether, the black body radiation spectrum and the photoelectric effect. Little did he know that within five years seminal papers that addressed all three would be published, which ushered in relativity and quantum theory and gave a radical reinterpretation to classical physics (or, rather, overthrew it). But we’re now a hundred years on and I do get a little annoyed when the quantum physicists state that their theories are upheld to the highest degree (they aren’t – the neutrino is not ‘supposed’ to have rest mass), and the relativity physicists state that theirs are as well (they clearly are not). There are huge problems and a new understanding is needed. In the meantime, the results of theorists to try to fit observations into their faulty theories spawns nonsense like cosmic expansion and inflation, the interpretation of the CMBR, black holes, dark matter and dark energy etc. It would be a lot better if the observational data were used to rethink the basic theories rather than inventing entities to provide a fix for discredited theories, which is rather like adding a few epicyles to the Ptolemaic model to save the phenomena.

    In another area of science, many prominent climate scientists don’t even understand classical physics, never mind modern physics, so much of what they write is absolute drivel, based as it is on faulty models. Fortunately, there are very many physicists who can easily see through this and who consequently don’t subscribe to climate alarmism.


    Dr. Giaever wrote



  11. 11 Charlie Mitton September 17, 2011 at 11:18 am

    Thanks for your comprehensive reply. I still think though that the fact that the word ‘arbitrary’ may be pejorative if only because you say that it undermines my argument. I did however mention the acausal connecting principle which, although supported by Jung, Pauli and others, is seemingly irrational. My use of the sign 23 is therefore not arbitrary. It is irrelevant that the 23ft. for instance could have been expressed in metres. It is precisely its acausal or transcendental quality which is up for grabs. You are effectively doing the same with theoretical physics when you say that science has been corrupted over 80 years by seeing mathematics as an originary reality since mathematics itself is an arbitrary construct.
    John D. Barrow in one of his books asks whether Gödel’s Theorem stymies physics since it means that any mathematical formula leaves something unproved. That something would then be arbitrary. Barrow goes on to say that science is therefore an act of faith and therefore a religion which is not only such but one that can prove itself to be so. Structuralist philosophy saw an ‘arbitrariness of the sign’ which was disputed by the poststructuralists who saw it as fallible since the originary sign itself can never be absolute. It could be seen as the same thing. David Hilbert tried to give an absolute foundation to mathematics in 1900 and others have said that Gödel blew this apart. Hilbert asked 23 questions. This leads again to a synchronicity and the idea that Hilbert’s 23 is transcendental and therefore not arbitrary.
    Roger Penrose has confessed to being a Platonist which would suggest something slightly different – that there is a universe of mathematical form behind reality.Some see however also a relationship of archetypal shapes and forms behind reality which also relate to physical realities and which may be immanent in nature. In the work of Paul Kammerer for instance, which Einstein himself saw worthy of consideration, there was through meaningful coincidence, a force pertaining to form and function which acted mosaic-like to bring similarities together. Since it would be theoretically possible to create a mathematics of them they could possibly called Neoplatonic. Penrose also sees consciousness as quantum based and something to do with the collapse of the wave function. Hawking has said that this sounds like magic not science. Penrose has also referred in several of his books to his Creator’s Pin hypothesis. This is that for the Creator, in phase space, to create a universe like our own, his aim has to be true to 1/ 10 to the 10 to the 123. From Platonism to Neoplatonism?

    ScientistForTruth replies

    “You are effectively doing the same with theoretical physics when you say that science has been corrupted over 80 years…” No, not the same. I’m not making any special claim for the number ’80’. and I accept that a year is an arbitrary definition, but one that is widely enough agreed upon for measurements of time.

    Kurt Gödel proved that any axiomatic system produced statements that could not be proven to be either true or false in that system. Even arithmetic cannot be proven, therefore, and all systems of mathematics are thereby incomplete. Alan Turing later proved that no effective decision process existed for solving all arithmetical problems: we thus have powerful machines solving problems where we have written algorithms, but Turing showed that there are some problems for which algorithms cannot be written. Computers based on logical processes can thus solve only a limited subset of all problems, and not all processes can be computer modelled.

    It’s widely held that mathematics is essential to physics, but that is false. It is useful but not essential, as demonstrated by Hartry Field (e.g. his 1980 book Science without Numbers), and it is possible that some physics cannot be reduced to mathematics, which, as we now know, is incomplete under any system.

  12. 12 John Carless September 18, 2011 at 12:59 pm

    Surely the two of you are very much in agreement. I don’t think that there has been on Charlie’s part the implication that SFT is making a special claim for the number 80. There is the agreement that science has been blighted by an over-reliance on mathematics leading to things that can’t be proved by experiment. This has led to the feeling that such things as string theory are over-rated and are difficult to prove. If Godel does leave incompleteness then the arbitrary acceptance of the value of the maths by influential physicists is a real flaw which is passed onto those who are interested but don’t understand the maths.

  13. 13 Charlie Mitton September 22, 2011 at 1:55 pm

    Indeed but….. I just happened to have been perusing, before reading SFT’s last reply to my postings, some quotes that I had taken from a book called ‘Has Hawking Erred’ by a Bohemian called Gerhard Kraus who is strongly critical of the assumptions made by not only Hawking but Einstein too and therefore most of the physics establishment. I had saved these quotes to my computer because I had to notice that a far larger number of quotes (from Hawking’s A Brief History of Time) were from page 23 than any other page. Not only that but the following quote is interesting:

    “Space is an inherent part of nature, while time, or a clock recording it, is a man-made tool arbitrarily aligned to the sun/earth relationship. Just as a metre-rod lacks the inherent potency to regulate the distances between objects or to influence their velocities, and a thermometer lacks the capacity to influence the temperature or weather, so does a clock, our time measuring tool, lack the capacity to influence or determine events happening in space.
    Based on such considerations, Einstein’s assertion that there exists an equivalence of space and time cannot be upheld.” (P.74-75)

    You say that our time standards are arbitrary but agreed by enough people that we can arbitrarily use them. This posting however seems to agree and disagree. In the case of general relativity it is not acceptable to use them since they suggest absolute time and that idea is no longer scientific since we have to accept that time started with the big bang. Also the page numbers add up to 23. I am not however arbitrarily using this particular piece of arithmetic since the 23 Enigma websites use permutations and I am merely following their seemingly irrational logic.
    Also though an example from one of the quotes from the 23 page reads:

    “According to Hawking (H23), a light second is simply defined as the distance light travels in one second…It is evident that physicists the world over (including Einstein and Hawking) have measured and expressed all macroscopic events in the universe in terms of regular terrestrial calendar time, which accords with the light second (measured in terms of conventional time). Thus they use their universal time standard, the main aspect of what Einstein defines as ‘absolute time’.”

    It is clear that something very odd has occurred. Previously SFT was dealing with the question of the arbitrariness of the 23 but in this case the Enigma 23 deals with SFT. They both become subject and object of the same thesis. This requires that the 23s and/or their permutations appear from nothing i.e. seemingly acausally. Once again remains the question of whether this is evidence of an ontologically real force at work. This can only be decided in probability theory by the context of a high number of similarly arriving 23s.
    I would also like to add that I had to reserve this book by Kraus from the Birmingham Central Library since it wasn’t on the shelves. While I was waiting I attended a musical event hosted by a Louise Kilbride. She was in the habit of bringing books to the event that those attending could freely dig into. I had to be knocked out that one of them was Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. It was as if it was known that I’d need it for reference. Another was Ouspensky’s A New Model of the Universe. The latter scribe was a contemporary of Einstein who was critical of his metaphysical assumptions. It was as if the books knew where to be just as I knew that I should check the Kraus quotes.
    Strangely enough this sounds like the logic of G. Spencer Brown where there is re-entry into the system, self -referentiality and the concept of nothingness is honoured. It requires a first distinction in the void and this is supplied by an unconditioned response to synchronicity. A logic can then be read after the event as the 23 particles mount. Research tells me that G.Spencer Brown was born in 1923 and his influential book Laws of Form was published in 1969 and 69 is again not arbitrary in the sense of capricious at leastbecause it coincides with the acausal project of 23 websites. What has to be the icing on the cake though was that GSB was a poet as well and published a volume entitled 23 Degrees of Paradise. Further research uncovered a website where a ‘Gerhard’ is discussing the question of nothingness as it relates to George Spencer Brown. He says that he is an engineer by training and so was Kraus!

  14. 14 Charlie Mitton September 23, 2011 at 8:26 am

    Absolutely more than amazing. Whilst going to the orange home page this morning I find that physicists in Switzerland have identified a carpet of neutrinos flying at faster than the speed of light. It is said to be very important and other scientists around the world are checking it. It seriously ruptures Einstein’s foundations (and Brian Cox’s book explaining it).The neutrino was anticipated by Pauli who worked with Jung on synchronicity. A significant shower of neutrinos was also observed on October 23 1986. I had thought about this yesterday and today is 23 September.

    ScientistForTruth responds

    As a physicist-cum-engineer, I’d like to introduce some sanity to these wild claims going about this past week.

    I’m singularly unimpressed that it is reported that the experiment has been done 15,000 times and yielded the same results. If there is something wrong with the underlying assumptions or data you can do it an infinite number of times and obtain a false result on every occasion. The path length isn’t being checked 15,000 times, is it? So if that is wrong then the results will always be wrong.

    There is scope for all sorts of errors here. We are only talking about 60 feet/18 metres difference in path length that could account for this. 18 metres in locations deep underground and 732 kilometres apart. Do they really accurately know the distance between the point of emission and point of detection of the neutrinos? There is no ‘line of sight’ that can be tested with, for example, light because the direct distance is through opaque rock, not around the circumference of the earth. Nor can it be tested with radio transmission as a reference since radio waves launched at the surface of the earth travel around the earth on a radius of approximately 4/3 times the earth’s radius, not in straight lines. If they have been using GPS then that will account for such an error – oh, yes, GPS is fine if you want to know where you are in relation to something that’s already mapped, whose co-ordinates have been uploaded, but it’s not going to be accurate absolutely, for example if you want to know exactly how far apart, and what the elevation is of two places hundreds of kilometres apart. How so? Because the atmosphere has a relative permittivity very slightly higher than vacuum which will translate into a few metres of absolute error when timings are compared to derive relative distances over hundreds of kilometres.

    Then there is the thorny issue of the rest mass of the neutrino. It’s not ‘supposed’ to have any rest mass, but apparently it does have some. What is the effect of the earth’s gravitation on the neutrino? The gravitation would be subtly different along the path of shortest distance, so what actually is the path of shortest distance in the presence of a varying gravitational field?

    Various assumptions must be being made as to whether the neutrino is travelling in a perfectly straight path or in a shallow curved path, based on factors about the neutrino for which there is still uncertainty. If the neutrino is travelling in a shallower curved path than expected, because some assumptions are wrong, then it will appear to arrive sooner than ‘expected’.

    Of course, the other possibility is that the ultimate ‘speed barrier’ is just a tiny fraction higher than what has previously been thought, i.e. 299,799,850 metres per second rather than 299,792,458 metres per second for light, with photons travelling at just below this speed barrier. OK, so photons have been consistently measured at 299,792,458 metres per second. So what? Has anyone considered that maybe photons don’t go at the ultimate speed, and that all the measurements of contraction, time dilation, mass increase for particles with rest mass etc as one approaches the speed of light would be very similar if it was referenced to 299,799,850 metres per second instead? Would tiny discrepancies between these have even been noticed? Nobody would have been looking out for it, would they – results would have been logged with a whole lot of confirmation bias.

    Since 1983 the speed of light has been ‘defined’ as 299,792,458 m/s, so if it is measured differently from the definition then this affects the length of the metre. I’m uncomfortable with defining the speed of light as an absolute fixed constant, because it begs the question about the speed of light being a universal and invariant constant. The speed of propagation of photons in vacuo can be calculated by electrostatic and magnetostatic measurements of the properties of the vacuum, i.e. the permittivity and permeability of the vacuum, without doing any measurements of speed of photons at all – this just falls out of classical physics (Maxwell’s equations) – it can all be predicted from static measurements. But of course, measurements of permeability and permittivity are inherently tied to electromagnetism and photons (and ‘virtual photons’ if you wish) and so determine the velocity of electromagnetic radiation – the speed of ‘light’. Neutrinos are not photons and, unlike photons, appear to have a tiny rest mass, which according to the Standard Model they shouldn’t have. So little is understood about neutrinos, and what we do know seems to challenge the Standard Model so we are likely to be in for an overhaul of physics some time soon.

  15. 15 Marty October 29, 2011 at 12:04 am

    There may be an observable “code” to our universe. Why does this imply a Divine builder? We observe that there are beings on the earth and maybe from space as well. We observe that a part of a holograph contains the whole. Perhaps each separate being contains the whole code of the universe in the same way as does a holograph portion. And perhaps the universe is a reflection of the “being.” If I have to settle on a delusion I like this one the best. And who knows, perhaps if we change ourselves we can change the universe.

  16. 16 radaractive November 28, 2011 at 2:59 am

    Michael Jordan wore number 23, so therefore the number 23 must be the most significant number in the world!!!

    How can anyone state with authority that “we have to accept that time started with the big bang” when there is no accepted big bang theory that does not include numerous fudge factors? Where is the dark matter and dark energy if not observed and why should we accept that they exist? By what means does a “singularity” appear and by what means does it “explode” and why should we accept that a Big Bang is a naturalistic explanation for the Universe when a singularity appears as if by magic and explodes by magic? Then there is the magical Planck Time when for 10^-43 seconds all rules of physics are ignored in order to accommodate an hypothesis which still requires that (approximately) 96 per cent of the Universe that cannot be detected by man must nonetheless be there?

    Every big bang hypothesis I have seen seems to be a case of trying to fit an automobile into a mailbox. Not one of them can account for what we observe in existence today. Also the Nebular Hypothesis appears to be another case of magical thinking as we do not observe it happening and what we know indicates it will never be observed. No one knows how stars are formed, either.

    In fact, those who refuse to consider the idea that a finite Universe must have a First Cause invariably will find a substitute for God, a substitute with the attributes of God without the name. In the end, this is where Du Satoy is taking us, the idea that numbers are God. Evolutionists believe that random chance is God.

    – Bill Watterson

    That fractals and patterns recurring throughout the Universe are observed and yet at the same time originality (no two people have the same fingerprints, no two snowflakes appear to be exactly alike, etc.) is also observed points towards design by intelligence. That the Universe is also full of beauty indicated a Designer with an intent to share that beauty with beholders. All 20,000-some species of butterfly have their own gorgeous patterns. All of them take four forms during their lifetime – egg, caterpillar, chrysalis and butterfly. Is there any conceivable way that a chrysalis can reproduce and evolve up to the level of a butterfly? How does a naturalist explain such a thing?

    Stephen C. Meyer has pointed out that the only explanation we have for design and information in the natural world is intelligence. For this reason he has worked in the field of Intelligent Design, doing what can be done with empirical science to point at the obvious, that conclusion that naturalists detest with all their might, that creation ex nihilo requires a Creator. Otherwise you are left with what I call UM (unattributed miracles) which is actually God with a different label. Du Satoy is not saying anything new. Neither is Hawking. They are all just looking for ways to avoid the unavoidable God.

  17. 17 Dave January 16, 2012 at 11:37 am

    Funny that you mention there is no evidence for a relationship between reality and numbers. What is physics all about? Any physics without numbers? Is that no evidence??

    ScientistForTruth responds

    It would be begging the question to say that physics, which has chosen to use tools developed by mathematicians to express what are the properties of matter and energy and their interactions, is therefore ‘about’ numbers. Of course it isn’t, any more than music is about notes on manuscript paper. These things are merely conventional.

    It was not always thus, anyway. Until Descartes invented symbolic notation, physics was done using geometry. That was the convention then. Take a look at Galileo’s work and see if you can find equations with symbolic notation.

    Any physics without numbers? I don’t see any ‘numbers’ in Newton’s Law F = ma. What about E =mc^2, is there a number there? Not if we express it as E/c = mc, or E = cmc, or c = SQR[E/m]. The ‘number’ in the first expression is merely a conventional way of expressing a square. We could just as easily use a sign that looks nothing like a number, as we do with the square root sign.

    Maybe your deeper question is whether there can be physics without mathematics. A naive view is that there is such a thing as the so-called laws of physics. But a law of physics isn’t a reality, it is a convenient fiction. It doesn’t have substance, energy, mass etc. It is not a ‘thing’ that itself is studiable by physics since physics is limited to things that are real and not conventional.

    The idea that there are such things as ‘laws of physics’ is merely a human construct in trying to make sense of the world. In reality, ‘things’ have properties that interact with other ‘things’, and trying to make sense of the relationships between ‘things’ has given rise to the conventional idea that ‘things’ have to ‘obey’ ‘laws’. This is an anthropocentric view of reality: because human behaviour is subject to law, and to an extent controlled by law, we extend that concept into the realm of the inanimate and unintelligent material world. Defining relationships in terms of ‘laws of nature’ is a choice we make for utilitarian purposes, but it is conventional and not real. It is fiction, not reality.

    Having made that choice (a regrettable choice in history, in my opinion, but we are saddled with it now) the question might well be asked whether it is possible to do physics within the paradigm of the so-called laws of nature without mathematics. This question was answered in the 20th century by the philosopher Hartry Field, who published Science without Numbers in 1980. To save time I reproduce some details here that are taken from Wikipedia, which is only useful as a starting point if you wish to explore further:

    Where Quine suggested that mathematics was indispensable for our best scientific theories, and therefore should be accepted as a body of truths talking about independently existing entities, Field suggested that mathematics was dispensable, and therefore should be considered as a body of falsehoods not talking about anything real. He did this by giving a complete axiomatization of Newtonian mechanics that didn’t reference numbers or functions at all…Having shown how to do science without using numbers, Field proceeded to rehabilitate mathematics as a kind of useful fiction. He showed that mathematical physics is a conservative extension of his non-mathematical physics (that is, every physical fact provable in mathematical physics is already provable from Field’s system), so that the mathematics is a reliable process whose physical applications are all true, even though its own statements are false.

  18. 18 radaractive January 17, 2012 at 5:58 am


    Formalism is greater than physicality. Now THAT is science without numbers, yes? I believe math is exceedingly important to make very precise measurements in order to accomplish very difficult things, such as landing men on the moon or designing deep sea diving devices. But overall concepts should be able to be expressed simply without numbers or they are not great truth, such as E=MC^2

    Post based upon and pointing to work published by David L. Abel =

    ScientistForTruth responds

    There is something attractive about formalism, but Kurt Gödel showed that logical systems of mathematics can never validly prove their own consistency, and this, I believe, is a fatal stumbling block to any formalist enterprise. Mathematical truth cannot be reduced to a consistent formal system. Not even arithmetic.

  19. 19 radaractive January 18, 2012 at 6:20 am

    One almost is therefore tempted to say that faith is the most reliable foundation for a worldview. If proofs can never be proved, then knowledge must be respected as the portrait and the brush-strokes both described and enumerated and the paint analyzed and chemically defined but it all rests on a canvas called faith.

  20. 20 Liam Power April 19, 2012 at 3:22 am

    It looks like Bob Dylan was right :

    ”You either got faith or you got unbelief
    And there ain’t no neutral gound”

    At least it’s musical.

  21. 21 KWRegan September 1, 2012 at 2:43 am

    You meant to write “Polanyi” not “Polyani”, but the name is actually “Simonyi”.

    SFT: Many thanks

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