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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i think some mathematicians would say that math has a telos but in a way more ineffable than physics. that even if the content is massive it isn't like it's disorganized. most probably they would say that stuff like the riemann hypothesis or the langlands program points to it
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yeah but are they right tho. lowkey think most of what mathematicians say about math is cope tbh
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