Because the Higgs field/boson (ordinary mass) has neither yet been observed nor made at Fermilab or CERN, many physicists are suggesting that particles may indeed be massless, their apparent masses correspondending to higher dimensional momentum components which cannot be detected. And P.S. Wesson suggests that the 1080 particles of our perceptible universe may actually be a single particle in a fifth time-like dimension multiply-imaged.
I find all this quite interesting and strongly agree that there is much we cannot understand about the physical creation much less "all that there is."
But the universe is intelligible precisely because it is structured, i.e. it is mathematical at the root. (Wigner's Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences - further discussed by Cumrun Vafa here)
Therefore I very strongly disagree that mathematics is a creation of man. That is the Aristotlean paradigm.
Instead, I assert that God created an intelligible, structured universe which is mathematical at the root and thus we are able to discover physical laws, physical constants, mathematical structures and geometries - universals - which enable us to "have dominion."
IOW, I hold to the mathematical Platonist paradigm which says that the mathematics (and geometry) exists and the mathematician comes along and discovers it. Man didn't create pi, circles, Mandelbrot sets and so on - he discovered them.
Reimmanian geometry is also an example. It was described long before there was any use for it and yet when Einstein needed a means to describe general relativity, he was able to pull it off the shelf.
Therefore I very strongly disagree that mathematics is a creation of man. That is the Aristotlean paradigm.
Came across an interesting take on the "Aristotelian paradigm" in my reading last night, from D. S. Kothari, writing about the complementarity principle in Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume (Harvard University Press, 1985):
Hideki Yukawa was once asked whether young physicists in Japan, like most young physicists in the West, found it difficult to comprehend the idea of complementarity. He replied that Bohr's complementarity always appeared to them as quite evident: "You see, we in Japan have not been corrupted by Aristotle."The implications of complementarity go well beyond applications in physics. Kothari writes, "...the principle of complementarity, which we owe principally to Niels Bohr, is perhaps the most significant and revolutionary concept of modern physics. The complementarity approach can enable people to see that seemingly irreconcilable points of view need not be contradictory. These, on deeper understanding, may be found to be complementary and mutually illuminating -- the two opposing contradictory aspects being parts of a 'totality,' seen from different perspectives. It allows the possibility of accommodating widely divergent human experiences into an underlying harmony, and bringing to light new social and ethical vistas for exploration and for alleviation of human suffering. Bohr fervently hoped that one day complementarity would be an integral part of everyone's education and would provide guidance in the problems and challenges of life." [emphasis added](LOLOL!!!)
Anyhoot, the above-mentioned "totality" is (I think) that which is fundamentally constituted by the underlying geometry, presumably from the beginning. Math (geometry) is a sort of "dimensionless existent" which man is able to discover (because it is implicit in the order of the universe -- what David Bohm referred to as the "implicate order"). Indeed, mathematical formalism and symmetry led to the discovery of certain particles -- the positron and neutrino, for example; and also a certain species of quark. In the formalism, these appeared as "holes" (there were eerily "present" in their absence, so to speak!) or something missing that ought to have been there. So the particles were predicted theoretically. In the cases of the positron and neutrino, it took a while for physical confirmation -- that had to wait until the observational/measurement tools were adequate to that task. But viola! Both particles subsequently have been "observed" experimentally.
Alamo-Girl, you wrote: "Recently, a noted biologist, Lanza, proposed that the act of observation itself causes reality." That is an extraordinarily radical idea, to say the least. It may even be true in some sense. But I'm not quite ready to speculate on that issue yet!
Thank you so much for your stimulating essay/post!