On 26/09/2019 12:18 am, [email protected] wrote: > > > Antony Barry > antonybbarry at me.com <http://me.com> > Mob +61 433 652 400 > > On 25 Sep 2019, at 6:51 pm, David <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > >> We could have a long debate about this! > > Been done. > > The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences > - Wikipedia > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences > Thanks Tony, good to see you again in this forum.
... "mathematical formulation of the physicist's often crude experience leads in an uncanny number of cases to an amazingly accurate description of a large class of phenomena". Mathematical models can be used in two domains - one to describe and explain in general, the other to predict behaviour in the specifc. In the first, non-linearity hardly matters. In the second it is critical. A classical example is the three body problem. A mathematical model can be constructed that explains, at a conceptual and logical level, the structure and relationships of three masses. The equations are not solvable, analytically. When a specific example is modeled numerically, the errors grow exponentially which make predictions useless, beyond a certain limit. Getting back to the original post, all this has been known for quite a long time. To quote from my first comment: > Numbers limit how accurately digital computers model chaos Gee, do these people not know how to research their subject. IMHO, the issue is not mathematics or chaos, it's the state of what passes for research today. Bernard -- Regards brd Bernard Robertson-Dunn Canberra Australia email: [email protected] _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
