It's what mathematicians have been doing since forever. We use scientific methods to understand our own creations / discoveries.
What is happening is that everything is becoming math. That's all.
What is happening is that everything is becoming math. That's all.
Math postulates a bunch of axioms and then studies what follows from them.
Natural science observes the world and tries to retroactively discover what laws could describe what we're seeing.
In math, the laws come first, the behavior follows from the laws. The laws are the ground truth.
In science, nature is the ground truth. The laws have to follow nature and are adjusted upon a mismatch.
(If there is a mismatch in math then you've made a mistake.)
Which axioms are interesting? And why? That is nature.
Yes, proof from axioms is a cornerstone of math, but there are all sorts of axioms you could assume, and all sorts of proofs to do from them, but we don't care about most of them.
Math is about the discovery of the right axioms, and proof helps in establishing that these are indeed the right axioms.
Who was it that said, "Mathematics is an experimental science."
> In his 1900 lectures, "Methods of Mathematical Physics," (posthumously published in 1935) Henri Poincaré argued that mathematicians weren't just constructing abstract systems; they were actively testing hypotheses and theories against observations and experimental data, much like physicists were doing at the time.
Whether to call it nature or reality, I think both science and mathematics are in pursuit of truth, whose ground is existence itself. The laws and theories are descriptions and attempts to understand that what is. They're developed, rewritten, and refined based on how closely they approach our observations and experience of it.
Seems it was Oliver Heaviside.
Do you have a pointer to the poincare publication?
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> Mathematics is an experimental science, and definitions do not come first, but later on.
— Oliver Heaviside
In 'On Operators in Physical Mathematics, part II', Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (15 Jun 1893), 54, 121.
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Also from Heaviside:
> If it is love that makes the world go round, it is self-induction that makes electromagnetic waves go round the world.
> "There is a time coming when all things shall be found out." I am not so sanguine myself, believing that the well in which Truth is said to reside is really a bottomless pit.
> There is no absolute scale of size in nature, and the small may be as important, or more so than the great.
> I just searched for the quote and my comment shows up as top result
Welcome to the future. Isn:t it lovely?
And shame on you (as in: HN crowd) to have contributed to it so massively. You should have known better.
That's how math is communicated eventually but not necessarily how it's made (which is about exploration and discovery as well).