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Stephen Was On TV Last Night on NOVA

It was an episode of NOVA on Public Broadcasting, discussing whether mathematics is created or discovered.

NOVA: The Great Math Mystery

Stephen's comment is that the areas that are most explored are the ones where math works well.

POSTED BY: Frank Kampas
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There is a longer video clip on the web (I have the clip -- lost where it is on YouTube) where Stephen elaborates on this idea.

I thought that the Nova was pretty good. They could have pointed out the nature of the problem better if they had presented the fact that Newtonian Mechanics turns chaotic when predicting the orbits in the solar system.(Discovered/proven by Poincaré in the early 1900s) I have no idea whether the solar system really is chaotic, or whether just the model is, but this is really the point. Physics pretty much studies the 'simple' stuff. When it comes to fluid dynamics, or biological systems, then an engineering mindset has to take over, with rules of thumb, 'close enough' approximations, and a constricted domain of applicability.

Thanks -- that was the video. Just too lazy to look for it 6 minutes ago. ;-)

Yes, physics seems only to handle linear problems. The Navier-Stokes equation is nonlinear so it's engineering.

POSTED BY: Frank Kampas
Posted 10 years ago
POSTED BY: David Keith
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