Talk:The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

message: 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... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.177.103.42 (talk • contribs) 23:38, 19 January 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  legacy 

message: 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 23:55, 19 January 2003‎  (UTC)
: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. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.177.103.42 (talk • contribs) 00:00, 20 January 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  moved 

message: 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)
thread_title:  vfd 

message: Reference 1 to "Mathematics Under the Microscope, Alexandre Borovik, 2006" is not correct.
The first part point to a page that no longer exists.
More importantly, the quote "There is only one thing which is more unreasonable than the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics, and this is the unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics in biology." does not occur in the Borovik's book. Maybe in the article, but that's no longer available.
I found one reference that suggests that the quote is from Israel Gelfand instead ( http://10outof10.blogspot.com/2007/02/unreasonable-effectiveness-of.html ). Here one Alexandre Borovik (!) attributes the quote to Gelfland.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.138.227.41 (talk) 09:11, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  correctness 

message: Nice read and a lot of good points.  Too bad that it has a ton of pitfalls where the author has logic fail.  There's one in practically every paragraph, so I won't list them all but if someone feels like it...
First, this has contradictions early on.  2nd, there's the concept of quantum mechanics, where events _seem_ to be circular, although in principle all paths are taken and effectively are layered (Even if there's multiple futures, time travel is impossible that tries to make 2 contradictary events occur - they simply can't observe each other - this is analogous to a black hole but for double-slit experiments - you can't 'unobserve' events).  Feedback can exist that doesn't contradict itself.  A self-consistent past and present in other words.  3rd is that it ignores the concept that reality is often layered, in that for example chemistry depends on atomic physics.  73.181.82.26 (talk) 18:58, 17 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possible flaws? 

message: I have a problem with the wording in However, in a passage discussing cognitive bias Wigner cautiously labeled as "not reliable," he went further. Neither did I find a satisfactory way to "parse" (analyze grammatically) that sentence. It is not even evident to the uninitiated that this is Wigner criticizing Wigner, not Putnam criticizing Wigner. --217.226.87.134 (talk) 21:38, 19 May 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: putnam arguably have nothing to do in a section on "wigner's observations" (unless, perhaps, he is Wigner's friend?); he should be moved to "responses". in the meantime, perhaps something like "In a passage discussing cognitive bias (cautiously labeled as "not reliable"), however, Wigner went further" would be clearer? k kisses 14:59, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comprehensibility 

message: About the mention of Maxwell's equations and electromagnetic waves, what exactly is being implied here? The text does not make it quite clear that Maxwell proposed the wave theory, even going as far as proposing that light was an EM wave and even calculating its speed. Then this mention of Hughes for "the discovery of EM waves" is kind of weird, there is no reason not to be mentioning Hertz instead. Also about gravity, explaining the motion of planets was clearly the goal there, and not explaining why things fall here on the surface of the Earth. But I cannot tell, how much of these criticisms would be actually directed to the original article we are talking about, or just to this Wikipedia article?... -- NIC1138 (talk) 17:13, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Maxwell and waves 

message: I was just about to add  when I noticed others had done so, and that it had been removed several times. If this is an article about the paper, it should be italicized. If it is an article about the concept, then perhaps it should be renamed to the "Effectiveness of mathematics", or at least be put in all lower case. If the article is not renamed, please leave this discussion at the top as it is a common edit. Dpleibovitz (talk) 21:15, 8 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  {{tl|Italic title}}? 

message: It seems inconsistent to note that there are at least six notable discussions of this paper and only elaborate on three of these responses. This article could greatly improved by expanding the responses section to include all of these- or provide some explanation as to why six are mentioned but only three are discussed. While I understand that the three discussions that are elaborated upon are by physicists and mathematicians that may have the greatest and closest knowledge of the subject, I would be much more interested and engaged by the other responses which fall are by individuals that do not work in physics/math.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Barcodeplane (talk • contribs) 19:54, 9 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Responses to Wigner seems incomplete 

message: Wigner originally presented this as a lecture in May 1959.  Google books says that this was the first use of the phrase "unreasonable effectiveness". Ahazred8 (talk) 18:08, 24 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  1959 lecture version