Kind: captions
Language: en
what's the difference between math and
physics to you to me you know very very
roughly math is about the logical
structure of all possible worlds and
physics is about our actual world and it
just feels like our actual world is a
gray area when you start talking about
interpretations of quantum mechanics or
no I'm certainly using the word world in
the broadest sense all of reality so I
think that reality is specific I don't
think that there's every possible thing
going on in reality I think there are
rules whether it's the Schrodinger
equation or whatever so i think i think
that there's a sensible notion of the
set of all possible worlds and we live
in one of them the world that we're
talking about might be a multiverse
might be many worlds of quantum
mechanics might be much bigger than the
world of our everyday experience but
it's still one physically contiguous
world in some sense but so if you look
at the overlap of math and physics it
feels like when physics tries to reach
for understanding of our world it uses
the tools of math to sort of reach
beyond the limit of our current
understanding what do you make of that
process of sort of using math - so you
start maybe with intuition or you might
start with the math and then build up an
intuition or but this kind of reaching
into the darkness into the mystery of
the world would math well I think I
would put it a little bit differently I
think we have theories theories of the
physical world which we then extrapolate
and ask you know what do we conclude if
we take these seriously well beyond
where we've actually tested them it is
separately true that math is really
really useful when we construct physical
theories and you know famously Eugene
Wigner asked about the unreasonable
success of mathematics and physics I
think that's a little bit wrong because
anything that could happen any other
theory of physics that wasn't the real
world with some other world you could
always describe it mathematically it's
just it might be a mess the surprising
thing is not that math works but that
the math is so simple and E
see that you can write it down on a
t-shirt right I mean that's what is
amazing that's an enormous compression
of information that seems to be valid in
the real world so that's an interesting
fact about our world which maybe we
could hope to explain or just take as a
brute fact I don't know but once you
have that you know it there's this the
indelible relationship between math and
physics but but philosophically I do
want to separate them what we what we
extrapolate we only extrapolate math
because there's a whole bunch of wrong
math you know that doesn't apply to our
world right we extrapolate the physical
theory that we best think explains our
world
you