The chief-guest seemed pretty satisfied, but it was my principal who had a problem. He was quick enough to react and snatch away my moment by saying, 'Math is not the queen of sciences. What makes you think so?' I didn't have an answer then. My only reaction was to despise him for his untimely remark. I was determined to butt down my principal on some other occasion, and hence started reflecting on why math can be called the queen of sciences.
With the passage of time I got answers, not to disprove my principal's statement, but to prove them. Balki in one of his lectures remarked, 'math is a tool to understand physics/science'. Well, I now feel it is something more than just a tool. I would love to look at math as the language of the universe. And science as a human effort to understand this language of the universe.
Think of it this way. A protein is folding itself in a particular way because it needs to minimise its statistical potential- a mathematical operation on a mathematical quantity. So, a proteins are in otherwords, the set of minima of set containing different statistical potentials (translated into english). Similarly music may be seen as a subset of all those functions of frequency with a function called power density proportional to 1/f (formal definitions are yet being researched on; frequency is a inturn a function of time, which is one of the dimensions in the world). Matter is the set of all the solutions of Schrodinger equation. Light is the set of ordered pair (E,B) satisfying four Maxwells equations (in 3 dimensions). Consider a transistor, a quantum mechanical device. It is easy to see that it can have, may be a complicated, nevertheless, a mathematical definition. Infact one can trace its existence back to infinite dimensional spaces, seemingly abstract concept for many of us, the real world champions. Give me any phenomena/process/device, I can assert comfortably that it can be converted into a mathematical operation/ set of mathematical operations on a mathematical functional or a set of mathematical functionals.
The real world is a graphical representation of the mathematical equations from which it's made of!. So what the scientists are doing is essentially making a graphical representation of the information nature has conveyed through its language.
What is called the real world depends on how much of nature's mathematics understood by our mathematicians, has been attributed to physical systems by our scientists. As we understand and attribute more of it, our sense of the word real keeps broadening. Infact, I would suggest real world be called the understood world. Or else, I am afraid, we may be doing the exercise of a frog in the well that thinks that the well is its complete world. 80 years ago, the real world consisted of only three dimensions. Later looking at the simplicity in Maxwells equations expressed in 4 dimensions, scientists thought perhaps universe operates in 4 dimensions, and what we call real should be expanded. Mathematicians worked in n dimensions way before that and even tended n to infinity. Abstract mathematics, which was seen as mathematics done by some geeks just for fun, started finding its physical application. Group theory in particle physics, vector spaces in devices are classic examples.
Nature explained itself to us in a language called mathematics. I would love to extrapolate this to such an extent that if Gods were to exist, they communicate- not in Sanskrit, Hebrew or Arabic, but in Mathematics. Now, if a Telugu person were to understand Tamil culture, he would explore it to the fullest if he learns Tamil first. Similarly if a human being were to understand nature, rather-nature's culture', he would better learn mathematics. Kudos to all people pursuing mathematics for taking their first step in understanding the nature's culture.
In the next post I would like to share my thoughts on the process of mathematics- how would it have evolved! Wait for it. For now, I would love to welcome some interesting/ refreshing remarks/discussions on my take on mathematics.
