learning more physics is helping me articulate what's been feeling off to me about math: physics feels to me like it has a telos in a way that (pure) math often doesn't
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physics is so cute i just can't even
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this is one of the things i found refreshing about cambridge too, that their conception of the relationship between math and physics was rooted in a history of not distinguishing them. "classical mechanics" was a *math* class. isaac newton was a *math professor* there
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but it's felt to me for awhile like at some point in the last ~30-100 years mathematicians stopped trying to understand *the world* and i think that was bad actually. mathematics disconnected from the world is just a complicated and engrossing puzzle game
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mathematics considered as a puzzle game is, to be clear, amazing. you never run out of content. content content content. you can have as much new content as you can handle. and i happen to be able to handle a lot. but it's so easy for it to not *go anywhere*
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i often forget that as a kid before i wanted to be a mathematician i wanted to be a physicist. i had big glossy copies of stephen hawking's "a brief history of time" and "the universe in a nutshell" and they blew my tiny little mind. i used to read pop physics books a lot
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remembering one pop physics book in particular where the author was explaining how he did some very difficult calculation in "perturbation theory" and i was like whoa perturbation theory that sounds tight
and now i'm a big boy who knows what that means! sweet
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is this 🦋 fulfilling your childhood dreams
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This articulation aligns quite neatly with my recommendations to youths who enjoy Maths, Physics and Technology at school while deciding what to look at studying at university.
If you enjoy Maths, as much Maths at possible and you enjoy it for itself, naturally, go Maths.
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If you enjoy Maths, including the advanced Maths, and you /extra appreciate/ when it has cool applications, Physics may be for you.
(Enjoying high school physics doesn't actually tell us a lot, but it's a necessary extra condition here)
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