Reality Is Stranger Than Fiction

I have probably said this a lot myself, but what would it mean if it were really true in some sense? That the human imagination is so bound by the reality it exists in that it cannot break through?

What about religion?

What about math? Very little math has any application to the real world. For example, where is the real-world application of the classification of Finite Simple Groups? What use are the transfinites? What use the ContinuumHypothesis?? What use is most of Computability theory? What use is GregoryChaitin's BigOmega? What use are GoedelsIncompletenessTheorems and the rest of GregoryChaitin's work outside of mathematics and philosophy? What use are thousands of such esoterica?

(Saying that some tiny fragment of overused math is crucial in many real-world sectors isn't the same thing as that all math is useful somewhere. Geez, learn the difference between universal and existential quantification people!)

Even the most obscure areas of math have an annoying tendency to find applications. For instance look at Hardy's book, "A Mathematician's Apology". He gave good reasons to believe that what he worked on was, and would forever remain, useless. It is now very useful in cryptography. :-) -- BenTilly

That's because mathematicians are "inspired" by the real world and tend to work on those minuscule parts of mathematics that have some relation to reality. What about all the math that contains no relation to our reality?

But getting back to the question of human imagination, isn't the theory that used to be superstrings sufficient reason to junk an empiricist view of physicists' imaginations? Because either its theoretical framework is so constraining that no alternatives are possible (in which case it isn't physics that constrains human imagination but math) or it's a fabulous example of human imagination at work!

I think that the average person can imagine scenarios much stranger than reality, but they don't say anything about it. RealityIsStrangerThanFiction in that the real world generates true stories that, without confirmation, would get laughed off as tall tales. -- RobMandeville

I'm trying to imagine a world where light travels by all possible paths between my flashlight and the wall. I'm trying to imagine space with an infinite number of dimensions. And particles that are paired such that one knows about the other instantly. And gravitational collapse. And time going backwards. And micro universes in my basement. But I can't. -- WardCunningham

Really?? I have no trouble imagining strange things, people keep telling me I think strange things, so I understand that some keep quiet. Every now and then reality does throw up something I had not thought of, but I bet someone else probably thought of it. I can imagine that imagining makes it happen.

Several of the things that Ward cannot imagine I do not believe actually happen. For instance I subscribe to the Everett Interpretation and so Penrose's theories of gravitational collapse look like hogwash to me. Paired particles don't react instantly, quantum entanglement merely lasts through observational events that we perceive as collapses. And so on. -- BenTilly

Light traveling all possible paths between a flashlight and a wall? That's just its wave nature showing. Easy to imagine.

Time going backwards? I'm not even sure what that means, but I can imagine block universes with no time. I do have trouble imagining 2 distinct temporal dimensions though. -- RichardKulisz

Note that the examples that you explain are not the ones that I said I don't believe in. Also I suspect that time going backwards was a reference to a positron being an electron going backwards in time in a Feynman diagram, so it is imaginable. -- BenTilly

I intended to support your position, sorry for being unclear.

I think it is really true in an economic sense. Fiction that is stranger than reality has no market to speak of. Or perhaps merely lacks the traits necessary to survive a publishing process.