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.
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.”
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.
“It is. That’s why it should be met head-on and tamed. You can do it!”
They used to teach kids to approach math and other difficult subjects and problems that way. No more.
The ordinal structure of existence is one of the greatest arguments for God.
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... = -1/12
Lazy is what it is. Math is merely a tool for physicist. You don’t alway have to understand the tool to understand the work.
I suspect this based on the facts that hard math doesn’t jive with their liberal interpretation of physics. The model that global warming was based on was intentionally doctored data that math would not support!!
Are there any participation trophies available? Shouldn't there be adjustments allowed for the curve?
There is the fact that physicists are interested in understanding the world, not doing abstract mathematics. Einstein mastered calculus by the time he was 15, and would probably be considered a math wiz by most, but said that in college he was uninterested in higher mathematics because he could not see its usefulness to a theoretical physicist. (A job description that barely even existed when he graduated.)
Certainly none of Einstein’s early papers, through his wonder year of 1905, including Special Relativity, required deep mathematical skill or insight. General Relativity, a theory perfected in 1914, did require Einstein to teach himself four dimensional non-Euclidean geometry, a truly arcane and difficult field.
Einstein was slow to accept the consequences of the advances in theoretical physics he unleashed, including quantum uncertainty, and the expansion of the universe.
Even Einstein had a mathematician to work out and derive his famous formula showing the conversion of energy and mass.
LouieFisk, thanks for posting this. It’s refreshing now and then to read a thread that is apolitical.