Math and Nature*…

I am looking for a cool site full of book reviews and recommendation of books that I would love to read, but that it would never occur to me to look for myself. You know what I mean?

Here’s a sight that is clearly not what I’m looking for. Checking them out, I immediately went to their hard science section, and clicked here for this book on General Relativity.  The publisher’s website associates this quote with the book:

” Mathematics is not the language of Nature. It is the language of mathematicians. “

This is so true! Although, honestly, the rest of the book seems like complete bunk. But really, there is the enduring mystery of why nature† is so well described by math. Well, I guess it sort of is well described by math. Simple arithmetic isn’t so good for describing quantum mechanics, but the theory of partial diffential equations does a pretty great job of it, if you interpret it correctly–which is a straightforward, if not intuitive, process.

Some people think it’s quite profound that math is so good at describing nature. It’s really really good for it, almost as if nature was written in math by a cosmic mathematician. Math is really everywhere, not just in physics, but in biology…and I suppose that exhausts all of nature. And the same math comes up so often, in seemingly unrelated problems; for example things like Laplace’s equation, which comes up in heat transfer, diffusion, wave mechanics, quantum mechanics, and lots of other things that don’t have anything to do with that stuff, like probably economics.

Well, here’s why math is so successful at describing nature. It’s because that’s what people have been creating math to do. Math is a tool, created by people, to do things with**. And we have expanded our ideas of what math is until we could use it to describe nature with high precision. Now, maybe it’s remarkable that nature is so predictable that it can be described at all, but given that the universe has been stable enough over the past 4 billion years for us to evolve, it only stands to reason that the universe we see should be predictable.

As fer the strange coincidence of some equations and constants (Euler’s constant comes to mind) popping up everywhere, that has more to do with those equations and constants being very easy to make approximations than that systems really behave that way. I mean, they do behave that way, but only if you aren’t looking closely enough.

*and video games

†I really do mean to get  on with the fascinating project of describing video games mathematically, really!

**it’s been somewhat frustrating to me that math professors seem oblivious to the fact that a lot of the math that they teach was developed with specific problems in mind. I think math education would be much easier on the student if students were introduced to the types of practical problems that math is good for before they are introduced to the proofs and theorems of the theory.