Why is the Universe Pythagorean?

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This is a talk given Apr 27 in a physics colloquium of the Queens College of the City University of New York (CUNY) over zoom, many thanks to Prof. Lev Deych who organized the event, hosted the colloquium and made this video. The talk is addressed to the general public; nothing more than interest to big questions is assumed.

ABSTRACT
The physical laws are very special: they allow not only for life to appear and develop, but to develop up to high forms compatible with thinking about nature and about thinking itself. Following conventional terminology, this remarkable feature of the laws may be called anthropness. The laws are even more special though: being sufficiently rich in complicated solutions for the anthropness, they are, at the same time, sufficiently simple and elegant to be discoverable by these very anthropoi. They are also universal, very precise and in a sense complete. A universe with such laws, both complicated and simple, may be called Pythagorean, in honor of the great ancient thinker who first somehow foresaw this. Why are the laws both anthropic and discoverable, making our universe Pythagorean? What answers have been suggested so far? Is there at least one that is reasonable?

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