Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to I don't believe that this disputes what you say.

No, it doesn't- it perfectly illustrates it!
DL — (archived)

But you can come to a point where you comprehend an equation on levels other than purely intellectual. A good example here is when I was in college freshman physics, I coasted a car from the top of a hill, down a gully, and up the other side. I could feel the gravitational potential energy of my mass transformed to kinetic energy and back to gravitational potential. I had an epiphany where I could *feel* the equations in my guts.

Its exactly that sort of mathematically shaped intuition that I mean when I say math is how the scientest knows about the universe. Don't get me wrong- i'm not saying it is a necessarily more truthful access, but it is a scientific access. Scientists don't think in math, per se, or at least not all the time (though I have met some people who think in Recursion Theory!), but math shapes how they think. I really am drawn by the analogy of Chomsky and deep grammer here.

I'd have to think about the equations, now to remember them, and I would not trust I got them right. But I still have a gut-level understanding of what they mean.

As far as E=MCC is concerned, all I can feel in my gut is that mass represents a whopping great deal of energy. Beyond that, I would not venture.

You probably know more physics than I- I'm more of a pure logician if anything- but math itself is a science... except when its not ;-)

DL

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