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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idk i don't think he elaborated. a lot of terms? the terms involved hard integrals?