To our essay about Abstraction Fetishism among Harvard math majors, an appendix for physicists:
The most practical person must
realise that abstract arguments (by
which we really mean arguments
with a tremendously wide range of applicability) are a necessity … now that science has grown so vast. If the engineer is willing to overcome
his nostalgia for the practical, and embark on the study of Lagrange’s
equations in a spirit of abstraction, he will be rewarded by having at his
disposal a powerful tool for the study of electrical networks, which are not
‘dynamical systems’ in the ordinary mechanical sense, but nonetheless behave as
if they were.
-- John Synge & Byron
Griffith, Principles of
Mechanics (1942, 1959), p. 411
Graduate students in theoretical
physics … are very often impressed with “formalism”
-- the formal apparatus of their subject. … I suffered … from an infatuation
with beautiful formalism. Working
with Viki Weisskopf was a most effective remedy against the excesses of such an
infatuation. He never ceased to
harp on the importance of … understanding, by means of simple arguments, the
physical meaning of a theory …
-- Murray Gell-Mann, “The Garden of
Live Flowers”, in Selected Papers (2010), p. 27
Re quantum theory:
This formalism has provided us with a revolution in our picture of the
real physical world that is far
greater even than that of … general relativity.
Or has it? It is a common view among many of today’s
physicists that quantum mechanics
provides us with no picture of ‘reality’
at all! The formalism of quantum mechanics, on this view, is to be taken as
just that: a mathematical
formalism.
-- Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality (2004), p. 782
That last clause provides a deflationary use of the term “formalism”, utterly at odds with the
connotation in the first.
The full essay can be viewed here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/06/on-vulgar-numbers.html
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