The Origins of Mathematical Physics: New Light on an Old Question

Imagine that you have to start science from scratch. Upon what disciplines should you draw? Philosophy, for instance, discusses the nature of time, space, and reality. Religion, too, tries to make sense of the world as a whole; and so, sometimes, does literature. Several disciplines—for example, biology and medicine—deal with special and highly significant features of the world. Such are the most natural ways to begin thinking about the world, and, in fact, most cultures make sense of their world through a combination of such intellectual resources. Mathematics, in comparison, appears like a non‐starter. Here is a theory dealing with abstract objects, aiming at internal coherence rather than at connection to any external reality. All cultures develop some ways of dealing with calculation and measurement, and in some societies, a more abstract discipline, a “mathematics,” may also emerge. But it is a peculiarity of the modern world to take this abstract discipline as the cornerstone for science.

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