Posted on 11/13/2016 7:25:21 AM PST by LouieFisk
Physicists avoid highly mathematical work despite being trained in advanced mathematics, new research suggests.
The study, published in the New Journal of Physics, shows that physicists pay less attention to theories that are crammed with mathematical details.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
That’s actually kind of strange, because there is a lot of history going back at least a couple of thousand years indicating that people seriously studied mathematics to understand the underpinnings of the world they perceived.
It’s finally corrupting the hard sciences.
I was severely beaten by a quadratic equation. I suffer from calculaphobia. If you think you can trust mathematics you weren’t paying attention to this election.
Not a problem. Pretty soon AI computers and AI robots will be doing all the math.
And driving cars.
And providing sex.
And nuking us when SkyNet goes online.
After that we won’t care about math anyway, we’ll be too busy organizing the resistance underground.
The simple explanation is that physicists use math, but generally are not themselves professional mathematicians.
Yeah. Someone kept placing an extra zero on Hillary's poll numbers.
“It’s not that math is hard: it’s that making sure you didn’t make any mistakes in your math, that is hard. “
Can you explain the Atiyah–Segal completion theorem?
“I was severely beaten by a quadratic equation. I suffer from calculaphobia. If you think you can trust mathematics you weren’t paying attention to this election.”
==
I had a tough time back in school. Well, it wasn’t the math so much as it was the principal of the thing.
:D
“The simple explanation is that physicists use math, but generally are not themselves professional mathematicians.”
Mathematicians live in a world of their own. During my graduate days, I became friends with one of my math professors. We each tried to enlighten the other. I think I was more successful than he was.
“I had a tough time back in school. Well, it wasn’t the math so much as it was the principal of the thing.”
Behave and you won’t have a problem with the principal.
Even Einstein had to get help from Marcel Grossmann with the math for general relativity. Just imagine what it would take to get Einstein to say “Ach! Zis ist vay too hard for me.”
OTOH, David Hilbert said in 1920 of trying to prove Fermat's Last Theorem:
`Before beginning I should have to put in three years of intensive study, and I haven't that much time to squander on a probable failure.'"
Maybe science, like police work, has become feminized. We sure as hell never would have made it to the moon if anyone were afraid of, of all things, MATH. Imagine a plumber afraid of pipes and water...
When you are faced with hard facts that your political agenda is a fraud, you avoid the facts.
I guess Einstein would be a good example. He was better at thought experiments and visualization than math.
Its very easy to get “lost” in the “mechanics of doing the math” and lose sight of the “physical target” you’re trying to understand.
Physicists focus on their own one set of equations so much, that I bet they’re nervous about diving into another’s equally dense work.
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