Some years ago, during a good-natured but heated exchange on the role of mathematics in describing the universe, I emphatically told a late-night television host that he was nothing but a bag of particles governed by the laws of physics. Not as a joke, although without missing a beat he turned it into one. (“Hey, that’s a great pickup line.”) And not as a jibe, for in this regard, whatever holds true for him applies equally to me. Instead, the remark sprang from my deep-seated reductionist commitment, which holds the view that by fully grasping the behavior of the universe’s fundamental
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