Science and Maths

[Guest]

I find science really interesting now. I didnt do well in it in school.  However if I found it as interesting as I do now I would have probably done better. The way everything works because of it. 

The thing about science and maths is that virtually everything in the world is based on them to some degree.

I'm pretty certain @nudge and @Eco are very knowledgeable of science. At least some categories anyway. One thing I cant understand is how they use maths to determine what happens in physics??

[nudge]

32 minutes ago, Gunnersauraus said:

One thing I cant understand is how they use maths to determine what happens in physics??

Look at it this way - mathematics is a tool, a language used by physics and other natural sciences to describe our reality and find patterns and relationships in the universe. 

[Guest]

39 minutes ago, nudge said:

Look at it this way - mathematics is a tool, a language used by physics and other natural sciences to describe our reality and find patterns and relationships in the universe. 

I still have no idea what you mean 

[RandoEFC+]

49 minutes ago, Gunnersauraus said:

I still have no idea what you mean 

Maths on its own is largely pointless in the grand scheme of things but it can be used as a language of quantities, ratios, rates of change, proportions, basically anything that has to be described in numbers rather than words. You couldn't explain some of the things that happen around us (simple examples include temperature, the passage of time, location and movement, aging) without numbers. Hard-core physics, chemistry, etc. is more or less a way more complex version of those basic examples.

[nudge]

1 hour ago, Gunnersauraus said:

I still have no idea what you mean 

Maybe you could be more specific with what exactly you don't understand? Physics, in its essence, is simply a study of how the natural world works. Everything in the natural world - regardless if it's simple everyday objects, planets, atoms, or anything else - always follows some rules. Physics is basically observing the natural world and then trying to describe those rules. To do that, it uses mathematical symbols, numbers, equations, calculations, etc. because it is the most accurate way we have to describe something in the natural world - if something can be quantified and is related to some other thing in a non-random way, then it can be described using math. Once you have the description of some rule, you can use that description to predict how other things/objects/whatever will behave in the future.

A very simple example:

You observe three different cars starting from the same point and moving for a specific period of time (let's say, for an hour), each at a different speed. After an hour passes, you will see that each of them has travelled a different distance. The same happens every time you observe it, so you are certain that there's a relationship between the speed, the time, and the distance traveled. To be more precise, you realise that the faster something moves, the more miles it travels in any given period of time. You can describe exactly the same using mathematical equation and using symbols for each of those parameters:

d = st, which is nothing else but a mathematical way of saying that distance equals speed multiplied by time. 

Now that you have that relationship described, you can use the equation to calculate (predict) the distance, speed, or time of travel of any other moving object, as long as you have enough information. 

This is obviously a very basic example, and the equations get much more complex depending on what you are observing, but in essence, that's what physics does - it describes the natural world phenomena using math concepts.

 

[Dr. Gonzo]

3 hours ago, Gunnersauraus said:

I still have no idea what you mean 

In physics they use maths to explain how/why things happen in the real (the physical) world. I was about to type out a response where I broke down the easiest physics formula I can remember (speed)... but @nudgehas already done that 

Thinking of maths as the language used in physics is a good way of thinking about the way maths & physics are intertwined.

@Devil-Dick Willie went from not giving a fuck about maths as a kid to now being a maths wizz at uni, so I'm tagging him in this thread

[Devil-Dick Willie]

My specialty was chemistry Deals in matters of the atomic and physical. Properties and structures of compounds. Never fucked with physics. 

Both physics and chemistry make enormous use of equations. Which is a 2 sided mathematic statement in which both sides are true. 

d=st. Distance = speed x time as nudge has alluded to. However, this also means that...
s=d/t. Speed = divided by time
t=d/s. Time = distance divided by speed. 

I believe a LOT of calculus is used in physics too. In fact I believe it was invented to describe motion. I was told by a medical physics student that you could map an entire human body, down to the anatomical structure using calculus. Wild. 

You can also use it for more basic things. Mapping out a car trip where the speed isn't constant and distance traveled is a related variable. 

[nudge]

10 minutes ago, Devil-Dick Willie said:

I believe a LOT of calculus is used in physics too. In fact I believe it was invented to describe motion. I was told by a medical physics student that you could map an entire human body, down to the anatomical structure using calculus. Wild. 

You can also use it for more basic things. Mapping out a car trip where the speed isn't constant and distance traveled is a related variable. 

Calculus is proper mad. Like, in a good sense - you can use it for literally anything that has anything to do with continuous change over time. Crazy. 

We learned the fundamentals of calculus and linear algebra in high school, then went deeper during 6 years of statistics courses at uni. Then I was happy to completely forget about it for years, until I got thrown straight back into in comp/data science courses a while ago 

[Devil-Dick Willie]

1 minute ago, nudge said:

Calculus is proper mad. Like, in a good sense - you can use it for literally anything that has anything to do with continuous change over time. Crazy. 

We learned the fundamentals of calculus and linear algebra in high school, then went deeper during 6 years of statistics courses at uni. Then I was happy to completely forget about it for years, until I got thrown straight back into in comp/data science courses a while ago 

I had to learn pre algebra, algebra, functions, limits, surds, calculus, equations and quadratics in the space of 14 weeks for uni 

I have forgotten most of it. 

[Azeem]

Our maths teacher used to say. 

" Kids start the year like I'm not gonna do this algebra, don't understand trigonometry, only know half of calculus, not gonna even touch rest of the stuff

Then come to me and say Sir do something don't fail me in the exams. If I'm gonna 'do something' then I'll appear in the final exams and put my photo on the diploma "

 

[Eco]

16 hours ago, Gunnersauraus said:

I still have no idea what you mean 

I appreciate the tag, but I'll remind the forum that I have an advanced degree in Russian Literature and Latin. 

I do love math and science though, so the easiest way for me to explain it is with gravity. 

You know when you drop something it falls to the floor. You may not understand why, but you know it does. Math is a tool used to tell you the rate at which it falls, the acceleration as which it falls, and then the speed at which that object falls to the ground compared to objects both larger and smaller. 

Hopefully that makes some sense. 

[RandoEFC+]

Maths has always been my passion and strongest subject, but in the UK at least, the education is a bit strange. I didn't have loads of intellectual curiosity when I was younger. Now I know a lot about different sciences but when I was being educated I could barely have told you which parts of science were chemistry, biology and physics. I didn't choose to take the three separate sciences at GCSE and I flunked out of Chemistry A Level pretty badly. My point being, although Maths was my best and favourite subject, I didn't really have much of an interest in how it was applied to our lives, I just liked Maths for Maths' sake. This continued pretty much through my A-Level and university studies. At university, where I studied Maths and Economics, I began to gain an appreciation of applied Maths, mostly from the Economics side of the course. It was the first time really I'd applied anything like calculus outside of a Maths lesson or lecture. This is where things changed for me in terms of my appreciation of how important my favourite subject actually was. I started my teacher training, not necessarily as a result of this slight epiphany, and the appreciation grew when we were asked to really think of how to teach Maths in a way that would help the students understand it, rather than just be able to do it, which is a massive difference. I loved doing small cross-curricular projects with teachers of other subjects (most often Geography) when we were training and the logistics weren't impossible like they are in real teaching. Before I started planning lessons and asking myself what I wanted to know about the why's and how's behind the mathematical methods, I had never thought about the subject in such an in-depth way. Getting kids to do the same is an uphill struggle to say the least, but it's really important to get them to have some appreciation of what Maths actually is, which I think is part of @Gunnersauraus' original question.

Nobody 'invented' Maths, numbers, physics, Pythagoras' Theorem, etc. They all got discovered, or at least people decided what symbols to use when they decided to start trying to write down these things that they were seeing. If you were a caveman and you came to a fork in the road, you saw one sleeping dinosaur blocking one path and ten sleeping dinosaurs blocking another path, you would still have known to take the path with just one dinosaur blocking it, even though the idea of numbers and counting was something nobody had ever thought of back then. It all builds up from there.

It makes sense to me why people grow up and leave school without feeling like they 'understand' Maths even though they can often do it quite well. I used to think it was a failure of education but I think now that it's almost impossible to really help someone understand real Mathematics/Physics unless they have a certain level of curiosity themselves. Where education does come in as that kids are generally allowed to build a perception from a young age that Maths is about getting to a correct answer using a method or procedure and the opportunity to use phrases like "what if" and "why" are fairly limited early on, which is a real difficulty for someone like me who tries to educate teenagers.

Representing even simple everyday situations using algebra or something is quite a high-level skill for the average person, but that's the sort of thing that makes you 'see the point' of all the equations and stuff you do in school. It's really difficult to explain to someone who doesn't know yet once the penny drops it becomes one of the most obvious things in the world.

As you can imagine, I could talk about this all day because not only Mathematics itself, but the different perceptions people have of it are absolutely fascinating to me. I'll leave it at that for now though. 

[Azeem]

17 hours ago, Gunnersauraus said:

I still have no idea what you mean 

So far all definitions were more technical. I'll explain in more humane terms. 

You saw a beautiful sunset. You think this is the most beautiful sunset ever, nothing can top it. But you want to explain that. 

If you are a painter you would focus on observing the aesthetic elements of it. The colour contrast was oragish red lighting was bit dark etc. Then the tools you would use would be brushes and paint colours. And your finally product would be a painting.

If you are a writer you would focus on the environmental aspects. It was getting dark, birds were returning to home, shopes were closing, it was little chilly, there were few people and a silence. Then the tools you would need are pen and paper. You final product would be a writing, prose or poetry. But first you need to think of plot/narrative for a good writing.

If you are a physicist you would observe the natural elements. What was the time of the day? 5:00 PM that is 18,000 seconds. What was your distance from the sun? 47000m. What temperature it was? 25C. Now since these observations are numbers the tools you can apply are operations of mathematics add, subtract, divide, multiply.

Now you can't just randomly apply these operators like in a writing you need a plot. That in physics is creating an equation. What if your distance from sun is 4700m but you're there in the morning 8:00 AM? 

So it must be time first distance later. Once you figured the right equation you would apply the operators and the final product would be a number 5.89. This would be regarded as the ideal sunset. A fixed number. That is traditional physics.

Now like a painter or a writer can imagine what their ideal sunset is without actually seeing it and still create a painting or piece of writing on it keeping some basics things like sunset are orange not purple in mind. A physicist can think of hypothetical situations and create equations on it based on established natural laws. This is what mostly Einstein did

 

[MUFC]

Times tables.