What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge

by Marcus du Sautoy

The question remains: what is this thing called God that is meant to be outside of time? Can anything be outside of time? Actually, there is something that I would regard as timeless: mathematics. And as a timeless thing it is well suited to the job of sparking the creation of what we observe around us. It is the creator responsible for the equations of quantum physics that give us space-time and something from nothing. Mathematics has an attractive quality: you don’t need to ask who created the mathematics. It is something that exists outside of time and doesn’t need a moment when it was created. It just is. Perhaps we should reverse the old adage ‘God is a mathematician’. Perhaps mathematics is the god everyone is chasing. If I replace the word ‘God’ with the word ‘mathematics’ in Aquinas’s attempt at a definition, I think it works quite well: ‘Mathematics is to be thought of as existing outside the domain of existents, as a cause from which comes everything that exists in different forms.’

Interesting. Maths