Dec 14, 2019
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
— Carl Sagan
seen from Malaysia
seen from Netherlands
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Syria
seen from China
seen from Canada
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from China
seen from Greece
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Canada
seen from China
seen from Syria
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
— Carl Sagan
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
Scholars have often expressed astonishment for how well mathematics works to describe our physical world. In 1960, Eugene Wigner published an article with the title above commenting that
...the mathematical formulation of the physicist's often crude experience leads, in an uncanny number of cases, to an amazingly accurate description of a large class of phenomena.
Here are some others’ thoughts:
The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.
— Albert Einstein
Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.
— Bertrand Russell
How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?
— Albert Einstein
Our physical world doesn’t have just some mathematical properties, it has only mathematical properties.
— Max Tegmark
Physicists may have fallen prey to a false dichotomy between mathematics and physics. It’s common for theoretical physicists to speak of mathematics providing a quantitative language for describing physical reality… But maybe… math is more than just a description of reality. Maybe math is reality.
— Brian Greene
More info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences
You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.
Richard Feynman
No matter how hard you try to teach your cat general relativity, you're going to fail.
Brian Greene
"I, a universe of atoms, am an atom in the universe."
-Richard Feynman, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track
[etsy/society6]
"The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy."
Steven Weinberg