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This One Moved Me

Дата публикации: 12-04-2026 14:57:49



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  • Level: High School 
  • Thread starter Thread starter bhobba
  • Start date Start date Apr 7, 2026
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Bill

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Jaime Rudas
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Frenkel says (4:32):

"Mathematics does not come to us from physical reality."

Is there really anything that could not come from physical reality?

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Frenkel says (4:32):

"Mathematics does not come to us from physical reality."

Is there really anything that could not come from physical reality?

I would say (imo) no. But, geometry is definitely an approximation or idealization of what we see in nature. Developing the logical consequences of these idealizations is what mathematics is.
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I think, at rock bottom, math is motivated by an abstraction of physical reality. Why that abstraction was chosen, and even why to some people it has appeal, and others go 'yuck', is a matter for psychological research. You see this in things like the small minority of people that firmly support LET, and those like me who prefer an abstract presentation based on symmetries:

https://physics.umd.edu/~yakovenk/teaching/Lorentz.pdf

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Bill

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djmanicbadger
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Math is cool but it dont " matter" lol

We see your feel in usage of "lol", but Mathematics gives us great, great predictive power.
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You might like to read Hardy's - A Mathematician's Apology.

He was, in a sense, proud that what he did had no application, but even he was wrong - there is the so called Hardy Weinberg Law. This is a very strange thing about math captured in Wigner's famous essay, which, if you have not read it:

https://webhomes.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf

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One trap in math that physicists fall into is relaxing a rule as a practical expedient to solve a problem. But to a mathematician, you have taken a shady shortcut that might come back to bite you.

I remember Feynman's story of the physicist who asks his mathematician friend about some math for 3D problems. The mathematician says I have just the math you're looking for, and says it can handle any dimension, but the physicist says, "No, no, I only want the 3D version."

Some time later, the physicist realizes that a 4D model would solve the problem if only he had the right math, and he goes back to the mathematician to ask about the multidimensional math he had previously sheepishly rejected.

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You might like to read Hardy's - A Mathematician's Apology.

He was, in a sense, proud that what he did had no application, but even he was wrong - there is the so called Hardy Weinberg Law.


I remember reading it and wondering why he was so proud that his math served no useful purpose other than to view its elegance and marvel at its insight.

I realized that Hardy and others of the time were appalled by war and its use of the latest scientific and mathematical discoveries that killed, maimed, or psychologically damaged so many promising young men and women and generations of families.

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