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4:11

(In »Living religion versus deadly alienation«)

When Paul later launches Christianity, thereby placing Plato’s parallel theory of ideas beyond death, there is unfortunately no Heraclitus at hand to call his bluff in this bizarre and seemingly endlessly generous promise, which is issued without any risk or cost whatsoever on the issuer’s part. Platonism thus wins a crushing victory. And Alain Badiou, unfortunately, makes the same mistake as his predecessor Plato. He is tempted by the aura of perfectionism of mathematics to cultivate an aspiration of being able to discover the eternal laws of physics before the physicists themselves do so. But his view of mathematics’ relationship to physics is, unfortunately, both historically and ontologically incorrect. It is physics that is primary and real, and it does not follow any mathematical laws per se. Or as Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel laureate in physics, expresses it: “A law of nature is nothing other than a condensed description, assumed and available in advance, of the regularities that an observed phenomenon displays during the period of observation.” Therefore the mathematical laws, when they are applied to physics, cannot either be anything other than, in the best case, just approximations; they can never be physically, but only mathematically, and thereby basically tautologically, exact.