Lorraine Ford I really appreciate the depth of your reflections,it’s clear you’re wrestling with some foundational and important questions about the nature of reality, and the role of mathematics in describing it.
I'd like to offer a different perspective, one that sees equations not as hollow, static symbols, but as something more like musical notation in a grand universal composition. It is this also the sciences and mainly the physics and maths, we play musics in trying to describe this reality in respecting the universal composition and for this we must respect several laws in the partitions.I don t tell this because I play guitar and piano but because the physics and maths are a little bi like the arts also.
Imagine the universe as a vast orchestra, playing a symphony that spans from the dance of galaxies down to the rhythm of atoms. The equations we use in physics,whether it’s Einstein’s field equations or Schrödinger’s wave function or other are like musical scores. They don’t generate the music themselves, but they encode the structure, the harmonies, the timing, the relationships between notes. They guide us through the flow and so the numbers and constants also.
Just like a symphony has different instruments playing in harmony, the universe has different "frequencies"—forces, particles, masses, energies—all playing according to specific patterns. And mathematics is the language we’ve discovered that best describes these harmonic relationships. Of course when we make this It lacks instruments and we cannot play this universal music but we try to respect the harmony and these gamuts, notes in the details of speific spheres of analysis.
What you mention,that the system itself must somehow “move,” or “know” its categories like mass, charge, position is true in a philosophical sense. But in physical terms, movement emerges from the structure. A musical score doesn’t move itself, but when interpreted by a conductor, an instrument, or a model,it comes to life. In physics, the initial conditions and the laws (the “score”) combine to produce the unfolding reality we observe.
When physicists write equations, we’re not claiming they are the totality of what exists. We’re saying: this is the structure we hear beneath the phenomena, like hearing a chord and knowing its components. We try to stay in key, respect the gamut, and identify where the music resonates with the reality we observe.
So the equations are not just arbitrary marks,they are attempts to tune in to the universal harmonics, to find the underlying logic and pattern that governs how things unfold. Without them, we’d just be hearing noise. With them, we begin to understand the music. It is there that the equations, maths, numbers partitions......become relevant when they respect this universal symphony because all is linked in this universal music palyed in an incredible complexity beyond our understanding