> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbot.2022.8504...
Yes, there are surprising correspondences in physics, mathematics and music. But they've never held predictive value - they're the kind of thing that seems beautiful and obvious once you know about it, but to my knowledge, no music theorist has ever made a useful prediction about sympathetic resonance in ship building.
The Karate Kid couldn't really learn karate by painting a fence.
I apologize for ranting about pseudo-intellectualism, that was harsh. I do hope you can see why this type of empty quip can provoke people. People actually study this stuff for years with rigor. If someone shows up without obvious credentials, makes a provocative non-point that seems to ignore the fundamentals of your field, and expects you to treat their points as valid, then you might think that person is displaying hubris. For me that was too much before my second coffee.
Regarding Karate Kid: I don't remember the movie, but I think you are bring too reductionist about reductionism. You can't learn karate by painting a fence, but leaning karate can teach you something about your body mechanics that can help you better paint a fence. And while geology is not astrophysics, learning about groundwater flow and dam construction might provide insights or new considerations into orbital mechanics with regard to how to handle the interaction of masses in a frame of gravity. I am friends with an astrophysicist and acoustics engineer and they seem to gain a lot from each other in their discussions of waves and analysis of measurements.
Regarding music and ship-building: Less known is that Leonardo da Vinci, famous for his paintings and engineering, painted "The Last Supper" with the mathematical help of his friend (possibly lover) Luca Pacioli. The Franciscan monk whose widely disseminated "Summa de arithmetica" gave us double-entry bookkeeping, even he really mostly repackaged the work of the artist Piero della Francesca, who in turn was riffing on Archimedes.
Of course the fields aren't predictive of each other, not exactly. But it can offer new questions or insights. An Archimedean "Eureka" often precedes the proving (or disproving) of the rule. And while that is a mere moment and it takes years of work to follow, regardless of whether you prove something out with words, figures, or art, I think it's that moment that gives the impetus to everything that follows. Sadly, I never trained as an artist, and I have trouble "reading" paintings as communications of geometry. The Tower of Babel seems to extend beyond mere words.
It's easy to see why people might overfit on the Eureka moment, but it might not ultimately be an overfit for humanity at large: it takes a collective to build a body of knowledge.