What's your favourite way of summing up Physics?

nesf

Mine is:

"An accurate but limited approximation of reality"

"The interactions between objects in the physical world with symmetrical forces in a continuous space."

"The science of nature."

"Physics tries to discover the pattern of events which controls the
phenomena we observe."

"The science of matter and energy and their interactions."

"The knowledge of things, as they are in their own proper beings, their constitution, properties, and operations ..."

My favourite is the second one, as it's just so simple.

Son Goku

A collection of, occasionally overlapping, qualitative and quantitative mathematical models of reality.

nesf

I'd prefer the word conceptual rather than mathematical.

Maths is just the language that physics is written in. The meat and meaning of physics comes from the concepts and abstraction involved.

But that is just my opinion.

Son Goku

I choose mathematical as opposed to conceptual because many areas have conceptual models of reality, only physics expresses its concepts in mathematical form.

Of course there is still holes in this definition.

nesf

My take on it is there is the maths actually means little. It's just nearly impossible to express the concepts in any verbal language most of the time.

You could express most physics in the form of a computer language and it'd be just as valid and true.

Just less clear.

I'd view the underlying concepts behind the mathematics as what physics truly is. If someone can only see the maths they can't claim to have grasped what's going on.

Then again, that's just the way I think, so maybe I'm just strange or something.

Edit:

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that the mathematical form of a physical law has the same level of importance and influence as the language of English used by Joyce or Shakespeare.

There is no inherent importance or relevance in the mathematical constructs. They are just a means of sharing the concepts and ideas between people.

For me Physics is just a conceptual model of reality, the fact that most people need maths to express it does not make the maths important or relevant.

It's just that maths is far more advanced as a language than say English. It is capable of representing far more intricate and complicated concepts.

This doesn't change the fact that is just a bunch of shorthand symbols used to communicate between people. Just like every other language.

If that makes sense.

Capt'n Midnight

Physics is an attempt to produce and use reproducable rules that explain the structure of the universe.

Chemistry is a subset of the study of electrons (with a bit of physics.)

Son Goku

nesf wrote:

This doesn't change the fact that is just a bunch of shorthand symbols used to communicate between people. Just like every other language.

If that makes sense.

True, maths is just a symbolic representation of logic and many physical concepts originally had heuristic descriptions.

I'll rephrase my definition as such:

A collection of, occasionally overlapping, qualitative and quantitative conceptual models of reality, generally expressed in mathematical form, guided by physical intuition and experimental observation and verification.

nesf

Hehe... another convert to the temple of conceptual physics...

My congregation grows...

carl_

nesf wrote:

My take on it is there is the maths actually means little. It's just nearly impossible to express the concepts in any verbal language most of the time.
[...]
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that the mathematical form of a physical law has the same level of importance and influence as the language of English used by Joyce or Shakespeare.
[...]
There is no inherent importance or relevance in the mathematical constructs. They are just a means of sharing the concepts and ideas between people.
[...]
It's just that maths is far more advanced as a language than say English. It is capable of representing far more intricate and complicated concepts.
[...]
This doesn't change the fact that is just a bunch of shorthand symbols used to communicate between people. Just like every other language.

Do you see a mathematicians job as simply transcribing well understood concepts into a neat language?
I would imagine most mathematicians would see the concepts *as the mathematics* and the symbols as a convenient way of expressing them.

Sev

Natural Philosophy

ApeXaviour

Damn ya sev, I was about to post that.


Yeah I prefer this old name, physics is too general imho and can be seen with too many different perspectives to be summed up specifically. Hence I second Natural Philosophy as adequately vague, yet wholly encompassing.

nesf

carl_ wrote:

Do you see a mathematicians job as simply transcribing well understood concepts into a neat language?
I would imagine most mathematicians would see the concepts *as the mathematics* and the symbols as a convenient way of expressing them.

Mathematics itself is a form of very rigid logic. The symbols themselves are just a convenient way of expressing said logic so that other people can read it.

You can express in one line of mathematics what would take over a 1000 words to express in english and even then the english version would be open to interpretation.

The actual symbols etc don't actually mean much. Mathematics is all about (for me) the concepts, what does 3 actually represent? What does + mean? etc.

Mathematics is the study of language of mathematics. My point was that physics is not the maths and was more accurately the concepts. With respect to physics, maths is just a language. That doesn't mean that maths does not have meaning. It just means that when you are modelling reality, maths is just a convenient way of noting down relationships in shorthand.

Maths itself is far prettier. It doesn't get muddied by being forced to apply to reality. It's pure logic. It's an axiomatic, self contained system. Physics isn't.

Capt'n Midnight

carl_ wrote:

Do you see a mathematicians job as simply transcribing well understood concepts into a neat language?

IIRC There was a theory that maths was finite and that one day it could all be know. There was also another theory that everything in maths would be proveable eventually. Both are wrong.

So there is an infinite amount of it out there and some unproveable so they would never be able to trascribe it all.

Also it's not well understood concepts, ancient fields in mesopatamina or egypt were long and thin because they of the way they were taxed based on an incorrect understanding of area - in other words they thought the concept was well understood but it wasn't. Another example would be the game show where the host shows you that the prize isn't in one of the three boxes and asks you if you want to change your original choice.

Maths is like philosophy, it is self supporting and doesn't need experiments to support it. As one person commented on the computer solving of the four colour problem, since the solution wasn't neat, that perhaps the problem wasn't as interesting as everyone thought at first. The proof of Fermats last theorm wasn't neat either but so much else depended on it that made it so.

planck2

Physics is expressing the laws of nature into a relatively simple and computationally useful form.

Son Goku

planck2 wrote:

computationally useful form.

I completely forgot that aspect.
Practically the entire motivation behind the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian.