[_joe]

Physics gave up being "deterministic" (in the sense you used the term in) about 120 years ago.

And mathematics is just a convenient tool with which we describe reality, no one would seriously think today that our math is deeply inscribed in the essence of reality as Galileo thought.

Apart from this, and the fact that the paper shows a very weak statistical significance, I agree fully with your last statement.

[wyager]

> no one would seriously think today that our math is deeply inscribed in the essence of reality

This is straight up wrong; most physicists I know, regardless of subdiscipline, basically agree on some variation of the idea that reality is somehow underpinned by algebraic structures.

[excalibur]

Reality is just a convenient tool with which we can discern mathematics.

[brucephillips]

> the paper shows a very weak statistical significance

How so? The p values are quite low.

[tempay]

They're not low enough to account for the look elsewhere effect[1] (known by a different name in this field, but the idea is the same). In this case they look at 500,000 measurements so finding p-values of 10⁻⁵/10⁻⁶ is expected.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect