The reasonable effectiveness of mathematics: Partial structures and the application of group theory to physics (Q1840971)

Physicists, philosophers, and mathematicians often discuss E. Wigner's idea of ``unreasonable'' effectiveness of mathematics in physics. As an example of unexpected effectiveness, Wigner mentioned the successes of group theory -- a theory that was originally developed to deal with symmetric situations -- in physical situations with no exact symmetry. For example, when analyzing a nucleus, we can ignore the difference in electric charges and treat protons and neutrons as identical particles -- ``nucleons''. The unexpectedness of this idea comes from the fact that in many known experiments, protons and neutrons behave quite differently. The author argues that this effectiveness seems unreasonable only because we are accustomed to classical 2-valued mathematical models in which each statement is either true or false. The physical world is often more adequately represented by partial models, in which, for some objects, some properties have the truth value ``unknown''. If we, e.g., ``abstract out'' the properties of protons and neutrons that are related to electric charge, then the resulting partial models become isomorphic and thus, the use of symmetry and group theory becomes fully justified.