What is Physics?
The dictionary definition of physics is “the study of matter, energy, and the interaction between them.” But, what that really means is that physics is about asking fundamental questions and trying to answer them by observation and experimentation.
Physicists ask really big questions like:
· How did the Universe begin?
· What did the Universe look like in the distant past?
· How will the Universe change in the future?
· What are the basic building blocks of matter?
· What powers the Sun and other stars?
If you think these questions are fascinating, then you will like physics.
Physics and the development of the sciences is the driving force behind history and human progress, spurring the development of modern technology and elevating human existence.
What about Mathematics?
Many apparently complicated things in Nature can be understood in terms of relatively simple mathematical relationships. Physicists try to uncover these relationships through observing, creating mathematical models, and testing these models by performing experiments. Thus, physicists use the language of mathematics to describe the way nature works.
Math Is the Answer to More Than One Question
Feb. 9, 2024
Saul Steinberg, Untitled, 1977.Credit...Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Mr. Wilkinson is the author of “A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age.”
I am surprised at this late stage, in my 70s, to be thinking about God. In my defense, I might say that I did not arrive at these thoughts by reflecting on my own inevitable end or from a religion or a Scripture or the example of a holy figure. I arrived by means of mathematics, specifically simple mathematics — algebra, geometry and calculus, the kind of mathematics that adolescents do.Several years ago, I decided that I needed to know something of mathematics, a subject that had roughed me up cruelly as a boy. I believed that not knowing mathematics had limited my ability to think and solve problems and to see the world in complex ways, and I thought that if I understood even a little of it, I would be smarter. My acquaintance with mathematics is still slight. I am only a mathematical tourist, but my experience has led me to believe that mathematics is rife with intimations of a divine presence.
This is no observation of my own. Mathematicians have been finding suggestions of divinity in mathematics at least since Pythagoras, in the sixth century B.C. For many mathematicians, there is no question that God is somehow involved. Newton, for example, believed that mathematics exemplified thoughts in the mind of God.
A couple of simple mysteries, available to anyone, help explain why this might be so. The first is the question of whether mathematics is created or discovered. Some mathematicians believe that mathematics is a system invented by human beings and that it is shaped as it is by the tendencies of human beings toward particular types of thinking. This is a minority view. The majority believe that mathematics exists as if independently of human thought and that the discoveries that mathematicians make are a mapping of an independent and timeless territory, a sort of parallel world where nothing is good or evil but everything is true.
There is also the observation by the Canadian mathematician Robert Langlands that mathematics is not complete, and because of its nature may never be. Mathematics, which attempts to define infinity, may itself be infinite.
For theologians in antiquity, infinity was a property of God. Being finite, humans were believed to be incapable of conceiving of infinity on their own. God gave us the ability, they thought, as a means of understanding his nature. Theologians were even a little touchy about his sole possession of it. In “Leaders of the Reformation,” published in London in 1859, John Tulloch quotes Martin Luther, sounding a little piqued in a dispute at a conference in 1529, saying: “I will have nothing to do with your mathematics! God is above mathematics!”
Toward the end of the 19th century, the mathematician Georg Cantor, the creator of set theory, discovered that infinity is not a static description. Some infinities, he said, are larger than others. For each infinity there is a larger one, an infinity to which something has been added. There are in fact a multitude of infinities, and infinities themselves can be added to one another.
Eventually, one arrives at the infinity that contains all other infinities. What surpasses all, Cantor wrote to a friend, was “the Absolute, incomprehensible to the human understanding. This is the Actus Purissimus, which by many is called God.”
When I was a small child, I did not think about God so much as I felt him or her or them, however you care to frame it. Not infrequently, and especially when I was in the woods, I had a sense of there being an accompanying presence, of there being, that is, something immaterial behind everything. I know now but I didn’t then that this feeling is sufficiently common that it has a name: immanence. I never talked about it with anyone; I simply assumed that everyone felt the way that I did.
Immanence is a second cousin once removed to pantheism, of course, the notion that God is in everything, and closer to the Greeks than to Christian monotheism. Perhaps not surprisingly, I was separated from this notion in Sunday school. There I was taught that God inhabited a book and the form of a singular man. It isn’t so much that I resisted these premises as that they didn’t stir anything within me. I didn’t connect them to the feelings that I had had alone in the woods. I gave up.I am grateful to have a sense of mystery returned to me by mathematics. I am pleased to have been given, from an unexpected source, a reason both humbling and human to feel that there is more to life than I might believe there to be. And even if created by men and women, mathematics, as I read somewhere, is the longest continuous human thought, a circumstance that is itself worth regarding with awe.
But what if I do not plan to be a scientist?
The discipline of Physics is an excellent way to learn the skills of logical problem solving. Solving physics problems with both logic and mathematics allows everyone to improve critical thinking skills, which can then be practiced in virtually all aspects of the working world and life in general.
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