In 2019 a book I wrote was published and distributed with the Spanish newspaper El País in a collection dedicated to the popularization of mathematics. The translation into English of my book title is Everything is Number: Is Reality Mathematical?
I addressed the problem of whether mathematical ideas correspond to an external reality, or if on the contrary they are arbitrary and vary with our current mentality. In other words, the question is whether mathematics is discovered, or invented. In one of the posts in this blog I dealt with this issue in relation to the real existence (or not) of the digits of number π (pi).
In the last chapter of that book I addressed a related issue: whether scientific theories, especially those proposed by physicists, are true (in the sense that they represent an underlying reality independent of us), or if are they mental or social constructs unrelated to a reality that could be unknowable (such as Kant's noumena) or even non-existent. I suppose my readers won't be surprised if I say that my personal position is clearly realistic, as is that of many physicists, while supporters of the anti-realist hypothesis tend to be predominantly philosophers.
