The Universe as viewed by mathematicians?

Mathemeticians often do not understand physics very well.

Of course math is important to physics, but physics is not important to math.

There are probably no singularities or infinities in reality. They will occur when the math is not fully encompassing the problem, and that's an issue of not enough physics rather than a mathematical demonstration of impossibility.

That "best" answer was written by a crack-pot and yet you couldn't tell? Wow. Don't buy any bridges.

You also believe "mathematicians" are as a class of people uniform and consistent in their beliefs about the physical world? Wow²

That is so profoundly lame.

I hope your simple world populated with cardboard people works for you. It won't for long.

-=-=-=-

As already stated, mathematics is a tool. There is lots of math that doesn't have ANY application in the world, other than to keep mathematicians and publishers employed. There is lots of math that has applications in the "real world". Why you would think mathematicians have some special wisdom when it comes to the "real world" is a subject you need to discuss with your mental health provider.

I have a question for you: Which infinities and singularities are "problems in the "real world" "????

-=-=-=-

Math is a glass half full and half empty. You can study math for your lifetime and be amazed at how much of it applies beautifully to the world around you. You can also be frustrated that with rare exception math does not capture all of the complexity of any one real world problem. It seems you have been sold a bill of goods. Somewhere along the line you seem to have swallowed the idea that math accurately and precisely models the real world. It does not. For some things, it is accurate enough, for other things it is completely unreliable.

Most of the equations of Physics (which you apparently do not understand is the realm of physicists, not mathematicians), when applied to real problems, can not even be solved except in the most simple cases. That is the mathematical solutions of the equations are unknown or do not exist in reasonably complex problems (for instance the three body problem). As soon as the question involves more than one or two particles and no longer has one or more axes of symmetry, most equations become intractable in real world applications.

Here are two more questions you should ponder:

1. What volume is occupied in 3 (or 4) dimensional space by a single point? (The only mathematical answer is 0, and yet that must be wrong unless we are not the sum of our components.)

2. Is the number 1 (or any number) real? (I defy you to show it to me.)

"I'm hopeless at math so I'm wondering : when it comes to the problems of infinities and singularities within mathematics, how do mathematicians view these problems in the "real world"?"

They work with choices of metrics, and move the singularity around (or eliminate it). For the case of black holes, the simple Schwarzchild metric is singular at the event horizon and at the geometric center. For Eddington and Kruskal metrics, they are singular only at the center. So they do a better job near the event horizon.

"Do mathematicians believe infinities and singularities exist in the real physical universe?"

They believe they can exist in the mathematics of a particular physical model. Experiment near those singularities will revel a better choice of mathematical model, and / or a better metric.

But the thing you need to understand is, classical theories have singularities, and quantum theories avoid singularities (as far as I know)... they just don't directly describe all the things we need to describe (spacetime, mass).

[EDIT: "Can singularities be avoided without the introduction of infinities?"

So far, we seem to be able to. All the problems of classical mechanics go away, when you stop trying to describe the Universe classically. So it may require a paradigm shift in the physical model, rather than the "simpler" changes in the mathematical model.

But all of Science is about the journey, not the destination...

]

Mathematians usually view the view the world in the their own set of model world, trying to eliminate as many variables as they can to make their equations simpler. With their batch of constants and variables, they perform experiments in the "real world". But to say whether or not world is real, for all I know, yes, the world is real. Don't believe the people who say this. But the question of the whether time is real is another story correlating with the "Chaos Theory" (link in sources). It is different for different for many people considering everyone has a different opinion and no one's answer on how the universe work will be the same. Your theory is just based on who you are and many times people only explain it as a hypothetical universe. Faith also comes into play, depending on the religion you may have another idea as to how the universe works.

-Your own personal genius high school freshman

Math is a tool. Either your math is based on reality, or it isn't. If it's based on reality, it can be used to predict certain things. For example, if you drop a ball, and you know enough about the environment, you can predict how long it will drop, and how fast it will be going when it gets there. But math doesn't dictate reality.

The math can be wrong if some assumption is wrong. That doesn't change reality.