The other day I was reading a blog article by Andrei Martyanov and he said in there: “One cannot fight physics and math, it’s impossible.” The article was not about math or physics and he is neither a mathematician nor a physicist, but what he said rings so true to me. I think it should be a guiding principle for mathematicians and physicists. I would add one more to that though: Occam’s razor. When stumble upon a seemingly improbable or inexplicable phenomenon, even some serious scientists often accept a possibility of answers, such as God, outside the realm of science. Pythagoras did it with the existence of irrational numbers. While examining his famous so-called Pythagoras theorem regarding right triangles, he evidently discovered the number $\sqrt{2}$ which is the hypotenuse of the right triangle with both the lengths of base and height equal to 1. (At that time Greeks believed that there are only rational numbers because they are beautiful as rightful creation of God.) After failing many attempts to write the weird (no not really) number as a rational number, Pythagoras finally has given it up and told his pupils that God made a mistake and ordered them not to reveal this to anyone outside of his school. (Anyone who disobey this would’ve been killed.) It turns out God (metaphorically speaking) created way more irrational numbers than rational numbers. Apparently, the notion of beauty for God was different from that for Greeks. Newton did it also with precession of the perihelion of Mercury. When Newton realized that the precession of Mercury’s orbit could not be explained by his law of universal gravitation, he concluded that it is God’s domain. But he was wrong. It had nothing to do with God. Humanity just had to wait until another theory of Gravitation, Einstein’s general theory of relativity came along, which finally could nicely explain the precession of Mercury’s orbit. If Nature obeys the laws of mathematics and physics, so should any phenomenon that occurs in it. In the Chinese TV series Three-Body (adapted from the novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin), some of the elite theoretical physicists committed suicides because they were in despair over the thought that physics doesn’t exist anymore after stumbling upon improbable/inexplicable phenomena that defy the laws of physics. Those phenomena, however, turned out to have been created by a highly advanced alien civilization to dismantle Earth’s scientific community because it could pause a threat to their plan of invading Earth. (Sorry for the spoiler.) Under the pretense of this having happened in real life, if those unfortunate theoretical physicists were to stick to the guiding principle that one cannot fight physics and math, they would’ve been still alive.
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