/sci/ - Science & Math

>>6077973
I'm sorry and I'm praying for your soul.

I bet you complain about >muh rigor too.

>>6077973
I empathize with you.
I don't understand why most people prefer physics and see math only as a necessary evil bridge they have to cross to get their dear physics.
I find that completely ridiculous.
Physics lacks any aesthetic value at this level of development while math as far as we're concerned, is perfect (consistent).
Nothing in physics is literally true in describing the universe while everything in math is perfect in describing the objects it's ascribed and every imaginable road you might take in doing math will give you the exact same result, something physics lacks completely.

What and math isn't? You're fucking insane.

>>6078035

Nope rigor is good. I just prefer the maths I suppose.

>>6078045

Thank you and I agree.

I guess I shouldn't say "I hate" physics; however, there's really just no substance in it to me. I'm interested in pure math (inb4 "no jobs") and I just don't feel the love when all my physics friends go on about it. Even my engineering friends prefer physics far over maths. (not a surprise I guess.)

and math is just applied art~

>>6078045
>Physics lacks any aesthetic value

Look at how fucking edgy this undergrad retard is. Look at him and laugh. He doesn't understand how science works and extrapolates his baby physics courses to the whole subject. He probably also thinks his 1st year analysis, algebra, and geometry courses are hard, aesthetic and represent math too. What a fucking pleb.

>>6077973
>>6078045
>>6078049
>>6078057
>>6078119
>>6078146
>>>/lit/

>>6077973
Epistemology is purer than math though.

not alone OP, I find physics boring
as someone interested in mathematical logic I'd rather find my applications in the areas of philosophy or cs

Physics isn't that far off from math.

>>6077973
Is it almost like how a lot of engineering majors hate taking math classes?

>>6077973
The thing I don't like about this comic is that it supposes math is interested in scientific pissing contests. Math is not a science, nuff said

>>6078151
8/10
got me for a second

>>6078146
I know how physics work and I appreciate all the good it did for us. I never said math was harder and hence for more intelligent people like me who are superior. Physics is certainly hard and requires just as much creativity, intelligence et al.
It's not my cup of tea though or many different reasons that I will explain in a second after I remind you that aesthetic value has no objective meaning and that's why I said "I empathize with you", not claiming that it was the absolute right answer.
Now, my reasons are uncertainty (nothing's exact), lack of firm grounds (axioms) that you can use to derive every small equation from, lack of firm framework to theorize and test, lacks freedom to explore and rarely applies globally in the universe taking into account all variables.
Also, graduate, not undergrad, and I apologize for sounding edgy.

It depends on the kind of physics you're taking. If it's based in algebra then it's going to be really fucking boring because you're not understanding the underlying themes. If you're learning physics with calculus then it should be exciting and wonderful and maybe you're just broken.

the truth: a good physicist needs to know a ton of mathematics; a good mathematician doesn't need to know shit about physics

stay mad scienceplebs

Physics/Math double major here. I like both, so I'll give some perspective.

>I don't understand why people see math only as a necessary evil bridge they have to cross to get their dear physics
The math that is useful in physics is terrible and unfun. It consists of integrals, solving differential equations, and so forth. There is no reason anyone would do this type of mathematics if there wasn't a goal. To a physicist, the goal is to predictive strength over the world.

That isnt to say that physics is just cranking integrals. You've probably heard of different physics theories: Newtonian mechanics, Relativity, Quantum Physics, Electrodynamics. Each of these theories is built from a small set of Laws ("Axioms" in mathematics) and the rest is proved from there. Einstein was essentially a mathematician when he derived Special Relativity from two assumptions that modified Newton's laws. I've heard some great mathematical arguments in physics class.

>>6078160
as a biologist I agree completely. Unfortunately, many scientists don't see that.

Math is applied philosophy.

>>6078168
>a good mathematician doesn't need to know shit about physics

Only shitty mathematicians don't know anything about physics. Mathematics and physics are closely related and tearing them apart has been bad for both physics and math.

>>6078530
please provide evidence for every point you've made in this post

>>6078530
Who let you out of the grave?

>>6078222
Math is applied autism.

>>6078584
>Physics is applied autism.
Fixed

All those fucks do is sit around repeating the same experiment over and over again and doing computations.

>Mathematics and physics are closely related and tearing them apart has been bad for both physics and math.
You're a retard who clearly doesn't know anything about the scientific method or the mathematical method.

>>6078152
>this is what physics majors actually believe.

physics is like the insecure little brother of math

>>6077973
If you hate physics you just don't know enough of it yet.

Also it's easy to dislike anything if your first encounter with it is someone shoving it down your throat.
I bet you didn't get hooked on math in a classroom, you probably did/saw/read something interesting outside of the classroom that got you interested.

There's so much to be interested in by physics, set the math aside, math is just the language we use to do physics. But the message is just as rewarding, especially some of the strange and almost sci-fi like concepts we get from things like relativity and quantum theories.

Or maybe it's just because to the average person the world seems like a disorderly, unpredictable, and scary place. But when you study physics you see everything reduced to its simplest components and realize that the world actually makes perfect sense and there is nothing to fear in the unknown.
>inb4 math does that too
well technically I see no reason all of math can't exist in a world that is fundamentally unpredictable. So math in itself doesn't necessarily comfort us that our universe is knowable.
That only comes from experimental verification leading to physical laws, and the capability of predicting things as an extension of that through theory.

>>6078045

> thinking math is consistent
> not knowing shit about Kurt Goedel
> being this dumb

You know nothing about either physics or math. You have no ability to speak about the aesthetics of either. Go away, pleb

>>6078613
math is consistent; we just can't prove it

oh look another physics major trying to show how smart they are because they've heard of the incompleteness theorem

>>6078626
>A is true but A cannot be proven.
Sure youre a maths major?

>>6078636
There are two possible claims one can make when they say math is inconsistent:

i) the current formalization is inconsistent

or
ii) mathematics as we know it is inconsistent beyond repair

i) is not a serious concern. Russell "proved" that mathematics was inconsistent but that doesn't mean we had to throw away all math done before the 20th century. We simply fixed the formalization. If ZFC were proven inconsistent, then we would 'simply' find a new formalization which avoids the inconsistency in question. In any case, 99.9% of mathematics has been and will be done independent of whatever formalization is currently in vogue so most people won't care.

ii) is an extraordinary claim (the claim I denied in my post) which is tantamount to saying that all mathematical theorems which have been proven and accepted for possibly thousands of years are meaningless in an absolute, almost platonic sense. I believe a statement such as '2+2 != 5' is obviously true despite the fact that we will never be certain that we can't also prove that 2+2=5. In this sense I believe that mathematics is true although it cannot be proven.

>>6077973
>Am I the only math undergrad who hates physics? I can't stand it. I find it cold and uninspiring.

That's funny, because that's how I feel about math.
I don't sense the same kind of fascination and inspiration from mathematicians, no love to the subject at all, but that's just my perception.
But even if math itself is fascinating, nearly every interesting application of it is found in the field of natural science and engineering.

Any hate for chem from you math fags? Now that is one subject which is cold and uninspiring, m8s. Although it can be pretty interesting, it's still pretty dull

>>6077973

Math grad student here. I actually love both of them, but hated labs, so I decided to go the math route. Good thing theoretical physics don't require an actual background in physics for many problems they have.

>>6077973
and math is applied philosophy, heh

but lets be real here, why is biology even a field of study? thats some real pleb level shit

>>6077973
Picture is false. More people struggle with physics than they do with Math. I passed Linear Algebra before I was out of high school. Physics, well I just got to AP Physics C: E&M but I didn't think I could handle the next two levels offered at a nearby community college. They offered fluid dynamics and all that other stuff and then quantum mechanics.

>>6078713
>Disregards mathematics as difficult
>Proceeds to brag about passing linear algebra

???

>>6078704
>applied philosophy
you w00t m8

>>6078151

Very subtle. Anons that are not savvy to /sci/ memes/board culture would not pick up on this.

9/10.

>>6078598
<fuck|you>

>>6078613
>>6078636
Godel's incompleteness theorems do NOT imply that mathematics is inconsistent; you are scolding him for understanding something that you can't. It's unlikely that you've ever even seen the proof, or you'd not make such a grave mistake. I thus conclude that you are just a Godel-Escher-Bach-lover who skims through articles and blog-posts, understanding nothing of what is being said. You are a pretender.

Allow me to explain the nature of Godel's completeness and incompleteness theorems. First of all, the completeness theorem says that a consistent first-order theory has a model - a universe of sets satisfying the axioms. It also says that you can then prove every formula that is true in ALL models.
The first incompleteness theorem says that every model of a consistent theory which contains Peano arithmetic includes undecidable propositions - statements that you cannot prove from the axioms because they are true in some models and false in others. People sometimes state this as "there are true statements that cannot be proven", but that relies on the idea that mathematical theorems are either true or false objectively, whether they can be derived from the axioms or not (the Platonic view). I prefer to see it differently. If you think of the axioms of mathematics as comparable to the axioms of, say, groups then the analogy would be in the statement: "the group is abelian: ab = ba". This cannot be proven true, nor proven false, because some groups (models of the group axioms) are abelian and others are not.
The second incompleteness theorem goes further and gives an example of a statement which cannot be proven true by a consistent theory. That is the statement "this theory is consistent". Combining this with the completeness theorem of earlier, we see that there must be a model of our theory in which the statement "this theory is consistent" is false!

It is possible for maths to be consistent - he just can't prove it!

>>6078166
> What is gödels incompleteness theorem

>>6079044
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorems