Talk:The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

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Does the influence of a paper belong in an article on the paper, or in other articles entirely? The stuff that is not just quoting from the paper could be in the article on Wigner, but it would then need to also be in other places...


Moved this page to properly capitalised title, thus hopefully making clear that this is about a specific work rather than a general article. --Robert Merkel

Yes, it is, thanks.
But it's about a very abstract work with many implications. The reason the paper matters is that, in practice since 1960, Wigner was borne out. There is a robust cognitive science investigation of 'is it the experimenter, the experiment, or the experimental phenomenon that is actually described here'. There isa robust discussion of possible alternate cognitions, e.g. other hominid, alien species, artificial life. The dire situation Wigner pointed to as a symptom has also come true: string theorists argue about how real the math or the theory can be since it's untestable and so abstract that very few mathematicians can understand it. So it's still confusing how much to quote and how much to comment, and how much to introduce of the articles very deep significance.
we should leave a redirect in place since there are other articles that refer to it with the lowercased title - they'll be fixed as time allows. Thanks.

VfD discussion for The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences, which now redirects here.

Text copied from The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences. Markalexander100 03:16, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

  • Delete, no reason to have it under this title. --Starx 03:20, 17 May 2004 (UTC)
  • I went ahead and speedy deleted it since it was just a copy/paste job. -- Cyrius|&#9998 03:25, May 17, 2004 (UTC)
  • You might want to go back and take another look. It's back. - Lucky 6.9 21:32, 17 May 2004 (UTC)
    • I think you're confused. We've got two pages here, Natural Sciences, and Physical Sciences. The "Physical" one is up for deletion as a bad copy/paste job of the "Natural" version, and has been recreated as a redirect by Eric B. and Rakim, which isn't a problem. The article you put the VfD notice on was the "Natural" version, which isn't at issue. Oh, and keep the redirect, it seems like a reasonable mistake to make. -- Cyrius|&#9998 22:15, May 17, 2004 (UTC)
    • Ah, so it is. Thanks. - Lucky 6.9 23:44, 17 May 2004 (UTC)