705 Quotes About Mathematics

The main reason we use math in physics, however, is because we can.

The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding: Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.

The general opinion in theoretical physics had accepted the idea that the principle of continuity ("natura non facit saltus"), prevailing in the microsoptic world, is merely simulated by an averaging process in a world which in truth is discontinuous by its very nature. This simulation is such that a man generally percieves the sum of many billions of elementary processes simultaneously, so that the leveling law of large numbers completely obscures the real nature of the individual processes.

There is nothing in the world except empty curved space. Matter, charge, electromagnetism, and other fields are only manifestations of the bending of space. Physics is geometry.

Away from the top of the throat [of variations of Calabi-Yau conifolds with warped throats], the two geometries look almost identical, and people used to think they could be used interchangeably. Shiu and I showed that the details do matter.

Dejando de lado la metáfora, pienso que la filosofía de los antiguos griegos nos atrae hoy porque nunca antes o desde entonces, en ningún lugar del mundo, se ha establecido nada parecido a su altamente avanzado y articulado sistema de conocimiento y especulación sin la fatídica división que nos ha estorbado durante siglos y que ha llegado a hacerse insufrible en nuestros días.

The physicists defer only to mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God.

The physicists defer only to the mathematicians, and the mathematicians defer only to God.

There are other reasons we use math in physics. Besides keeping us honest, math is also the most economical and unambiguous terminology that we know of. Language is malleable; it depends on context and interpretation. But math doesn’t care about culture or history. If a thousand people read a book, they read a thousand different books. But if a thousand people read an equation, they read the same equation.