Math, it would seem, is reductionist. Distilling out the most stable forms that are expressed by reality. Yet do these forms pre-exist reality, or are emergent with it?
Does form exist in the void, or does it emerge with the initial fluctuations of the vacuum?
If we distill a body down to its most stable form, we have the skeleton, not the egg.
Epicycles were pretty good and predictively accurate geometry, as a description of our view of the cosmos. We still see the sun as rising in the east and setting in the west.
Though the crystalline spheres, posited as physical explanations, were lousy physics.
The map is never a complete description and understanding of either the territory, or the processes generating it.
Currently we have spacetime as the physical explanation for the math of relativity, but are seconds really equivelant to inches, or is this just a convenient analogy?
We are these mobile organisms, necessitating this sequential process of perception, so we experience time as the point of the present, moving past to future, but doesn't change turn future to past? Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration being the present, as the events come and go.
So there can be no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
In which case, time, as an effect and measure of activity, is similar to temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
Math is a very effective conceptual tool for exploring our reality, but like any tool it can be misused.
The sociology of math is similar to human sociology in any situation, where useful theories congeal into beliefs, as the torch is passed from one generation to the next.
Until such time as they are reduced to absurdity and we find ourselves spinning off into time travel through wormholes in the fabric of spacetime, multiworlds, multiverses, etc. Adding patches and epicycles whenever necessary to sustain the institution.
