Saturday, April 21, 2012

On the thing called Physics envy



Physics envy, this term was introduced to me while listening to the talk between D. Dawkins and Dr. Tyson during their conversation on " The Poetry of Science".

It is interesting to note that Dr. Dawkins mentions this term at the outset of their talk.  Let me have the current wikipedia entry of this term pasted here for reference:
"Physics envy essentially refers to the envy (perceived or real) of scholars in other disciplines for the mathematical precision of fundamental concepts obtained by physicists. It is an accusation raised against disciplines (typically against soft sciences and liberal arts such as literature, philosophy, psychology, social sciences, and some areas of biology) when these academic areas try to express their fundamental concepts in terms of mathematics, which is seen as an unwarranted push for reductionism." 

From Wiki, Reductionism: can mean either (a) an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or (b) a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents.

I am attempting to document the talk between these two scientist one belonging to evolutionary biology and the other one being an astrophysicist. There is more to be naive about knowing the subject of Physics or is it? why?

"One needs not believe about things that one has been told", this is the first sentence spoken by Dr. Dawkins (about universe's homogeneity) and was supplemented by Dr. Tyson that one believes things depending on how the evidence (supporting that thing) is convincing to oneself.

Scientists in Physics (or a mathematically founded science) are trained to abandon their senses, use the scientific tools to do the measurements, then use the mathematical models/analysis to develop mathematical models to predict/manipulate logically to make new discoveries about the world. One needs to get used to the predictions made by such a logical way, it might take some time to get used to this process (as understood by all the scientists). Maths allows us to take incremental steps in our logical understanding beyond those possible by using our senses and perhaps the capacity of our human mind too. If one looks at the process of making a mathematically helped discoveries, one might think that it was our human mind that does the discoveries but one must remember that our human mind did not do that discovery (prediction) of the unknown by it self, it had to use an additional tools called mathematics and other scientific equipment.

A discovery might have the capacity to demote a sense of the self (before the discovery was made). Awesome talk-out-thought of deGrasse. Human race is currently interested in discovering the existence of other "intelligent" life. The question is we have coined the term intelligence in such a way that no other creature (at lease) on earth can rival such a definition.

Ending with a quote from  Eugene Wigner "The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve." deserve....who are we to question that appropriateness/coincidence? not all coincidences can be explained by our current understanding of things.



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