Once E.G.D. Cohen remarked on my progress in our research project: “Physics is not mathematics.” At the time his remark struck me as provocative, but stayed with me. Indeed, one way to say, what physics is, is to say what it is not! Physics is not mathematics: now, ten years later, I find myself fully agreeing with Eddie. For me, mathematics is the language of physics, not its substance.
Sometimes I like to illustrate this idea with an example from “real biology”: Draco ignivomus, the common fire-spitting dragon—a newly described species I would like to introduce into the taxonomy 📜🧐. We can describe it in perfectly sensible English. We could even build a mathematically rigorous model of how it spits fire. But none of that would bring it into existence. So far no evidence of it 🙂…
The most important lesson I took from Eddie: a successful theory begins with a physical insight—something you can explain first in plain language. The mathematics comes after. The rest is technique. Is that not the reason why at the times of Hooke and Newton scientists formulated first their laws in Latin?