Counter Intuitive Maths
“Math doesn't lie, but our brains are huge scam artists.” - Scott Adams Ever since Newton, maths has become the language of science, especially physics. That trend only accelerated in the last century to a point that when asked whether physics would ever again have a theorist like Faraday who could do wonders without sophisticated maths, Richard Feynman replied: “I'd say the odds are strongly against it. For one thing, you need the math just to understand what's been done so far. Beyond that, the behavior of subnuclear systems is so strange compared to the ones the brain evolved to deal with that the analysis has to be very abstract.” And yet even physicists (at least the pre- Feynman era ones who were at the cutting edge of 20 th century physics) couldn’t believe in their own maths: 1) Physicists of the day, for example, had to wait for Hubble and his data before they believed what the mat...