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Our Mathematical Universe

Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark. I was primarily interested in this book after reading Permutation Cities by Egan, which speculates the wild idea that computation can be carried over without a machine to run it on. Pair that with the idea that we could be living in a simulation and the next logical step is that our universe could just be such a simulation, or more abstractly, that we are a mathematical (which include any simulation program) object. This feels like such a crackpot idea so I was delighted to find a non-fiction book on this.

For the first part of the book I was overwhelmed with information. I knew very little about cosmology and pretty much everything was news to me. For the second part, I had a better prior layman knowledge of quantum mechanics but the possibility that quantum randomness is an illusion and could be explained via multiverse was mind blowing.

Most of the book is dedicated to laying down the current understanding of our universe and that the more we dig, the less “real” it seems and the more “abstract/mathematical” it feels. It then makes the case for the “universe as a mathematical object” at the very end. I think the book adds a lot of substance and rigour to the idea I was hoping to learn more from it.

As in the General Relativity book, I was left wanting to understand the mathematics of physics better. I hope one day to make through Penrose’s The Road to Reality which I heard is a difficult read. This is definitely my favorite read of the year.

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This entry was parsed from an older retrospective post.