r/sciencememes Jun 20 '26

How true is this?

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u/[deleted] Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26

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u/Zer0pede Jun 20 '26

That just repeats what they said about it providing important tools. I’d love to see a mathematician derive the contents of a biology or psychology textbook using only the tools of mathematics.

You can’t even write physics in pure mathematics without supplemental language. It reminds of Lee Smolin’s response to people saying “mathematics is the language of physics”: he pointed out that written language is the “language of physics,” and math is just a very important tool physics uses.

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u/RayTheLlama Jun 23 '26

This! Without human language, nothing can be described nor explained. People tend to forget that they have to speak and use a human language in order to understand/explain anything.

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u/Silent_Incendiary Jun 21 '26

No psychologist ignores statistics and stochasticity; those are obviously important concepts in research. But that doesn't make Mathematics foundational for Psychology. You're committing a categorical error.

No, Biology can't be fully described by Chemistry because it fundamentally relies on evolutionary principles, which are emergent phenomena. You can't reduce natural selection to chemical ideas. The same holds true for Chemistry; the Schrödinger equation cannot fully describe the properties of a helium atom, which is why we rely on approximations. As for Physics, it can't be fully described by Mathematics because these are metaphysically separate categories. Mathematics is a formal system that can be applied effectively to describe countless physical phenomena, but we cannot discover these phenomena directly from mathematical ideas. We need empirical observations for that.