Western News editor Jason Winders’ column drew my attention for a number of reasons. (“Finding ways to rekindle faith in Science,” Western News, March 5.) It began by singing the praises of a Mr. Gladwell, who is apparently king of the counter-intuitive.
Good grief. The man must be at least 500 years late. When I think of truly great counter-intuitionists of their time, I think Galileo, Copernicus, Dalton, Darwin, Boltzmann, Schrodinger, Einstein, Dirac, and so on.
Science is built on counter-intuition. I guess some things old are always new again. And I am forever grateful science is not a democracy.
But the item that really caught my eye was Winders’ statement, “a biologist and a physicist can’t read each other’s work.”
The inference was this was a bad thing. But is it? Do we really invent jargon to separate ourselves? I think not, really.
So I want to talk a little about mathematics – presumably considered amongst the leaders in jargon.
For those who know it, it is not jargon. It is a beautiful, elegant, profound and brilliant language, without which we simply could not understand the mysterious world we live in. And never is this more apparent than in the worlds of quantum mechanics, General Relativity, fluid flow and many other areas.
It was not invented as jargon, or a way to hide us from the world – it is a language, and it has music and poetry and stories to tell. It also houses the purest, and most profound philosophy known to humankind. Even today, with our best attempts to translate it into English, it still holds many secrets. Indeed, it not only holds secrets, it hides philosophies that defy the greatest thinkers that have ever lived.
This is particularly acute in the area of quantum physics, which, thanks to Paul Dirac, is built on the foundations and logic of pure mathematics and Hilbert spaces. Mathematics understands quantum entanglement, wave-function collapse, the nature of light and many other areas we can only grope at. This is revealed every time we have challenged predictions against those of our simple intuition – it always wins, and we are left even more puzzled and embarrassed. Translating mathematics into human thought and language has always been one of the greatest challenges.
The logic of pure mathematics is the purest logic in the world. It outshines the greatest philosophers, for it is an absolute logic, not a subjective one.
This language is not just text – it lives, and it is one of the only microscopes we have into seeing the quantum world. Ironically, though, to understand it, we often need to retreat into the mind of a child. For many years,
Physicists referred to Alice in Wonderland to understand the weirdest aspects of our world – perhaps because a child has a mind sufficiently malleable they can bypass ‘common sense’?
But you need both the malleable mind and the power of mathematics.
Without mathematics, it’s just speculation. Of course, we, as scientists, need to live in the real world despite the tendency for us to be viewed as children in need of protection (unfortunately implied in the popular sitcom The Big Bang Theory), we can function quite admirably as sensible efficient adults. But when the chance presents, it is nice to go back to those young days when anything was possible and the conforms of society did not yet bind us.
Pure mathematics was always my best subject, but I moved into physics because I craved the outdoors. It has been good. I have worked in many countries and places, literally from pole to pole, with my science. But I still use this wonderful language.
As a student, I played competitive soccer on a team which was dominantly pure mathematicians. After each game, every Saturday, we would find a watering hole and drink to our successes or commiserate our losses (more often than not the latter). At the end of the evening, we would always make this toast:
“To pure mathematics, and may it never be of value to anyone!”
For it is poetry and music and passion. But … it is of value.
So, here’s another toast:
“Here’s to Mathematics – the beautiful jargon.”
Wayne Hocking
Physics and Astronomy professor