Besides the traditional questions of where or what the Platonic world of perfect mathematical blueprints actually is, this view moves us towards a number of deep and fascinating questions. It elevates mathematics pretty close to the status of God in traditional theology. Just take any work of medieval theology and alter the word 'God' to 'mathematics' wherever it appears and it makes pretty good sense. Mathematics is part of the world, and yet transcends it. It must exist before and after the Universe. In this respect, it is reminiscent of our discussion of the nature of time in earlier chapters. In the Newtonian world-view, both space and time were absolute and independent of the events played out upon them. Then the Einsteinian transformation of our concepts of space and time (whose radicalness is obscured by the fact that the concepts retained the same names) linked space and time to events going on within the Universe. Maybe a similar evolution of this interpretation of mathematics will emerge? Although at present mathematics seems to transcend the Universe because cosmologists think they can actually describe the Universe as a whole in terms of mathematics and use mathematics to study the process of creation and annihilation of universes, perhaps the nature of mathematics will become more closely associated with physically realizable processes like counting or computing?

John D. Barrow