I had the opportunity to attend a talk given by Frank Wilczek, Nobel laureate in physics and author of the book The Lightness of Being. During the Q and A after the talk he was asked if our aesthetic judgment of symmetry could be said to prejudice scientific inquiry. Wilczek first pointed to the rich […]
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I don’t have a lot of time to write this week and next but I felt a little surge of thoughts gather when I read about the implications of Einstein’s Second Law (m = E/c^2) which is a simple rearrangement of the now famous E = mc^2. It was in The Lightness of Being by […] It’s easy to neglect the detail of one person’s, now historic, philosophical discussion of math and science. But there is a moment, in Henri Poincare’s well known text Science and Hypothesis, that I would like to shine a light on today. The first English translation of the book was published in 1905. Chapter IV is […] The following exchange between M.P. Schutzenberger and A. Connes is lifted from the book Triangle of Thoughts: M. P. S. — …language begins with poetry rather than with grammar; euphony plays a big role here. A. C. — Your point of view coincides with my own, since I sincerely believe that music is at its […] In the first half of the twentieth century, physicists and mathematicians began to raise questions about what they could say about what they were actually doing. The ‘truth’ of things was beginning to elude the seekers of that truth. Both the validity of mathematical ideas and the objectivity of physics came under scrutiny. Questions about […] I’ve become a bit preoccupied recently with the world of early 20th century mathematicians, partly because of a book I’m working on, but also because of how late 19th and early 20th century thinking largely defines the mathematics students learn today. In this light I found a book of selected writings of Hermann Weyl, a […] I noticed an irrepressible smile on my face as I listened to Peter Sarnak’s lecture in a complex analysis class I took in graduate school. I tried to account for the pleasure I felt about ideas I could just barely comprehend. It seemed I understood the significance of the exploration, that these abstractions were discerning […] Even students of mathematics rarely have the opportunity to explore the kind of thinking that leads to ground-breaking achievements in their discipline. I was struck, very recently, by how students in my calculus class would not likely reflect on how it was possible that the tedious arithmetic they were doing (solving equations involving clumsy fractions […] I wrote not too long ago about the recording of the aftermath of particle collisions in ongoing high energy physics experiments. The post took note of the imaginative management of uncertainties (quantum mechanical uncertainties, measurement uncertainties and statistical errors). This hotbed of uncertainties is disentangled with the mathematics of probability. Mathematics here is being used […] The hoopla about Hawking’s new book made it frustratingly clear that there’s a real impasse in the centuries-old debate over whether science, and its intrinsic rationality, can or should definitively dispute religious ideas. The impasse is, I believe, a consequence of our not seeing the elephant in the room, namely ourselves. The debate proceeds, as […] |
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