Daniel Whiteson

Can we do physics without math?

Can we do physics without math?

Yeah, I don't know.

On one hand, you would think, gosh, you gotta have math to do physics.

It's like asking, can Shakespeare write without language, without English, you know?

It is the language of our science.

And the example of Higgs is an example of math leading us to a discovery, right?

Not just being useful, not just expressing our answers, but like pointing us in the right way.

Follow your mathematical instincts and the universe is mathematical.

So you will make discoveries.

And there's so many examples of that.

right you know there's maxwell for example he's putting together gauss's law and empire's law and he's using symmetries he's like let's figure out how we can write these things the same way and that works but he notices that there's a piece missing he's like this would be more symmetric these equations would balance better if there was another piece which we now call displacement current

He didn't know it existed.

He just wrote it in there because the math told him to.

He's like, oh, I can't resist adding this term.

And then went out and discovered it's real.

It's part of the universe.

So again, the mathematics, the desire for symmetry, for mathematical structure, leads us to discoveries.

And I think it's underappreciated how well our theories work.

And I had this moment when I was an undergrad learning quantum mechanics,