A Hundred Years of Solitude Ending

There is a scene in Gabriel García Márquez's book, "A Hundred Years of Solitude," the final scene; that I kept in my memory. The last pages tell us how the world is coming to an end, at the very same moment, that a character in the novel finally figures out the secret of the town: When you figure out the fate of your world, your world will end. And then the book ends.

It is eerie because that is how I feel right now.

The Gulf of Mexico catastrophe, the flood in Monterrey and Texas, the heat wave in the East Coast, and to top it all of, I am finally understanding what is the role of Information in Physics.

The most important task for physicists today, is to figure out how the fit between mathematics and observations is so tight, and getting tighter.

My answer is that mathematics does not exist outside our heads. The only mathematics we will ever know, is the embodied mathematics, as Lakoff and Núñez would say. The mathematics we make.

Then how do we choose what to keep and what to throw away?

We only keep what fits.