{"id":462,"date":"2008-06-18T09:05:27","date_gmt":"2008-06-18T14:05:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=462"},"modified":"2008-06-18T09:05:27","modified_gmt":"2008-06-18T14:05:27","slug":"the-necessity-of-mathematics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/462","title":{"rendered":"The Necessity of Mathematics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sunclipse.org\/?p=663\">Awesome megapost<\/a> over at Science after Sunclipse, covering many overlapping issues on the topic.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>To use mathematics in the natural sciences, we first decide how we wish to represent some aspect of the world in mathematical form. We then take the diagrams and equations we\u2019ve written and manipulate them according to logical rules, and in so doing, we try to make predictions about Nature, to anticipate what we\u2019ll see in places we have not yet looked. If additional observations corroborate our expectations, then we\u2019re on the right track. (It\u2019s rarely so clean-cut as that \u2014 the process can spread across thousands of people and multiple generations of activity \u2014 but that\u2019s the gist of it.) Several skill sets are involved: one must know how to idealize the world, and then how to work with that idealization. Remarkably enough, our schools fail to teach either skill.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Awesome megapost over at Science after Sunclipse, covering many overlapping issues on the topic. To use mathematics in the natural sciences, we first decide how we wish to represent some aspect of the world in mathematical form. We then take &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/462\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,28,39,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-math","category-physics","category-science-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}