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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Is physics becoming a thing of that past?
« on: 22/04/2008 11:42:23 »
I work in communications, but with people rather than computers, and in particular, I am working with visual communications. I am interested in the information carrying capacity of images, and what one finds, is that it is very high compared to other ways of communicating, such as words or numbers.
what one finds is that using images one can deal with much more complex scenarios, communicate much more complex information, than one can with mathematics, and that suggests that maths is not an efficient way of dealing with describing complex things, like our world.
Mathematics is, of course, a language, just the same as English, and visual language, but each language has its own particular characteristics that make it useful in different circumstances. The peculiar characteristic of maths is that it is predictive and quantitative, but there are always trade-offs, and what is traded is semantics, that is meaning, and complexity, that is, the ability to deal with, describe things that are easily accessible to word languages and visual language. The peculiar characteristic of images is that they can deal with extreme complexity, but they are not predictive, or minimally so... I think.
One has to ask then, are the restrictions of mathematics holding science back? If it restricts us to thinking and being able to deal with only simple things, then maybe there comes a time when one says, prediction is not everything, and, at the very least, we perhaps should be exploring just where visual language could take physics?
what one finds is that using images one can deal with much more complex scenarios, communicate much more complex information, than one can with mathematics, and that suggests that maths is not an efficient way of dealing with describing complex things, like our world.
Mathematics is, of course, a language, just the same as English, and visual language, but each language has its own particular characteristics that make it useful in different circumstances. The peculiar characteristic of maths is that it is predictive and quantitative, but there are always trade-offs, and what is traded is semantics, that is meaning, and complexity, that is, the ability to deal with, describe things that are easily accessible to word languages and visual language. The peculiar characteristic of images is that they can deal with extreme complexity, but they are not predictive, or minimally so... I think.
One has to ask then, are the restrictions of mathematics holding science back? If it restricts us to thinking and being able to deal with only simple things, then maybe there comes a time when one says, prediction is not everything, and, at the very least, we perhaps should be exploring just where visual language could take physics?