<story><title>Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math</title><url>https://nautil.us/why-physics-is-unreasonably-good-at-creating-new-math-797056/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>selectodude</author><text>To some extent, observation has taken a back seat because we&amp;#x27;re at the point in our physics journey where we pontificate about things that are too small or too dark and far away to see. We simply can&amp;#x27;t observe this stuff anymore.</text></item><item><author>tines</author><text>&amp;gt; it wasn&amp;#x27;t made during the nineteenth century&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s because people were totally focused on physics, and math was just a useful tool sometimes. Doing physics was the true goal and observation the final arbiter of truth.&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, that distinction is blurred but for the opposite reason; people think that anything conceived by sound math must be true, and observation has taken a back seat.</text></item><item><author>cjs_ac</author><text>One of my physics lecturers at university made the offhand observation that the distinction between physics and mathematics is a &lt;i&gt;twentieth-century idea&lt;/i&gt;: it wasn&amp;#x27;t made during the nineteenth century or before, and it seems to be disappearing in the twenty-first.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>janalsncm</author><text>I don’t agree with this. I think there are definitely people like Michio Kaku who have books to sell who spend their time pontificating. People just think that physics looks like pontificating because that’s what it looks like on TV.&lt;p&gt;But there are also active researchers doing real research. Physics postdocs aren’t just sitting around in a circle making up stories about what the universe is like.</text></comment>
<story><title>Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math</title><url>https://nautil.us/why-physics-is-unreasonably-good-at-creating-new-math-797056/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>selectodude</author><text>To some extent, observation has taken a back seat because we&amp;#x27;re at the point in our physics journey where we pontificate about things that are too small or too dark and far away to see. We simply can&amp;#x27;t observe this stuff anymore.</text></item><item><author>tines</author><text>&amp;gt; it wasn&amp;#x27;t made during the nineteenth century&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s because people were totally focused on physics, and math was just a useful tool sometimes. Doing physics was the true goal and observation the final arbiter of truth.&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, that distinction is blurred but for the opposite reason; people think that anything conceived by sound math must be true, and observation has taken a back seat.</text></item><item><author>cjs_ac</author><text>One of my physics lecturers at university made the offhand observation that the distinction between physics and mathematics is a &lt;i&gt;twentieth-century idea&lt;/i&gt;: it wasn&amp;#x27;t made during the nineteenth century or before, and it seems to be disappearing in the twenty-first.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>glitchc</author><text>Like the atom was in the 18th century? Electrons and protons in the 19th? Quarks in the 20th?</text></comment>