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New Theories / Re: New theory of modern science
« on: 12/06/2021 23:14:37 »
A good friend and mathematician showed me, a few months before she died, a note that I had written 50 years previously: "physics is a trivial particularisation of mathematics". I still hold that to be true, provided that you interpret "trivial" in its mathematical sense.
The whole business of physics is to produce mathematical models of what happens, and for that we use a very small subset of mathematics, plus an awful lot of hard experimental work to make sure we know what we are talking about and check that the maths really does consolidate and predict the results of our observations.
So what? The complete works of Shakespeare is, mathematically speaking, a trivial particularisation of the English language. And a motor car is a really tiny application of physics and chemistry (itself a tiny subset of physics). To invert the question (the sort of thing scientists do), we can consider Shakespeare (Henry V, prologue)
Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O pardon, since a crookèd figure may
Attest in little place a million,
And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work.
Just because it's a tiny bit of a trivial application of an enormously (infinitely? more than that - we can distinguish several kinds if infinity....!) broad subject, doesn't make physics, chemistry or astronomy any less significant in our trivial lives. You can build a car with maybe a dozen spanners, and the catalogs list thousands of different tools including spanners, but that doesn't mean the car is designed by spanner manufacturers, or is less useful than a horse.
The whole business of physics is to produce mathematical models of what happens, and for that we use a very small subset of mathematics, plus an awful lot of hard experimental work to make sure we know what we are talking about and check that the maths really does consolidate and predict the results of our observations.
So what? The complete works of Shakespeare is, mathematically speaking, a trivial particularisation of the English language. And a motor car is a really tiny application of physics and chemistry (itself a tiny subset of physics). To invert the question (the sort of thing scientists do), we can consider Shakespeare (Henry V, prologue)
Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O pardon, since a crookèd figure may
Attest in little place a million,
And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work.
Just because it's a tiny bit of a trivial application of an enormously (infinitely? more than that - we can distinguish several kinds if infinity....!) broad subject, doesn't make physics, chemistry or astronomy any less significant in our trivial lives. You can build a car with maybe a dozen spanners, and the catalogs list thousands of different tools including spanners, but that doesn't mean the car is designed by spanner manufacturers, or is less useful than a horse.
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