
Quantum Poetics: Why physics can’t get rid of metaphor - Hooke
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/quantum-poetics
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whatshisface
The reason that it is difficult to write physics knowledge in English is
because physics knowledge _is_ math, in that really what it boils down to is a
bunch of relationships between things we can measure and other things that are
studied by mathematicians. That's what we've been building up over these
thousands of years. _That 's what it is._

You absolutely can explain a physical law in English, but it's either going to
be 1. directly correspondent to the equations or 2. inaccurate.

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reptation
There are physical phenomena that do not readily become math. "Positive and
minus attract" for instance does not have an obvious mathematical basis as the
inverse square law.

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whatshisface
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Charges q1 and q2 will experience forces
(all else being equal) proportional to q1*q2. This captures the way
attraction/repulsion scales with amount of charge, and gives you the sign rule
for "free."

Here is a fairly in-depth page about it:
[http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/em/lectures/node28.htm...](http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/em/lectures/node28.html)

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mannykannot
Those pages have some interesting observations - for example, it begins with
an action-at-a-distance model, but then it goes on to say that this is
inconsistent with Newton's third law in a universe in which information cannot
propagate instantaneously. This is presumably implicit in the math, but does
making the point in natural language go beyond that?

More generally and abstractly, does the math have anything to say about
causes, and if not, is that a limitation or a profound insight?

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whatshisface
Propagation delays are missing from Columb's law, which is what you get from
Maxwell's equations when you assert that everything is static (meaning, in a
practical sense, that you think everything is slow-moving _enough_.) This can
be written in either math or English - and don't think that it's never
"aesthetic" to write math in English. People do it sometimes.

> _More generally and abstractly, does the math have anything to say about
> causes, and if not, is that a limitation or a profound insight?_

The most reductive way of looking at it is that physical laws are the file-
compressed versions of lots and lots of lab spreadsheets. The odd part about
this picture? The compression ratio is mind-boggilingly high; and even more
amazingly it can often (essentially always) predict the contents of lab
spreadsheets that _have not already been filled._ Information theory probably
has something to say about how this works out but I don't know what it would
be.

