Since people are taking this joke tweet seriously, here’s my real take: there’s no reason to think mathematics is effective in the natural sciences at all. IMO most scientific “explanations” boil down to curve-fitting or story-telling that ultimately begs the question. https://twitter.com/littmath/status/1344059243310288898

In some sense it’s a great (and evidently very useful!) triumph that we can add enough epicycles to make useful predictions, but I’m rarely convinced that I’ve understood something really fundamental when I learn the scientific explanation for something:

Let’s take F=MA. Force itself is, as far as I can tell, entirely fictional — how does this explain things? One can take this as a definition of force, or a statement about certain proportionalities (ie m1*a1=m2*a2, for two objects of mass m1, m2, in the same situation.)

But more fundamentally I find that even those very basic “laws” beg the question — why are they true? I know I sound like a little kid who repeatedly asks “why?” in response to any explanation, but it’s how I feel.

(Ok, and admittedly I’m trying to be a bit provocative here — you could probably talk me down a bit.)

Since there’s been some controversy, maybe worth noting that any philosophy I do on Twitter is necessarily half-baked, and I’m thinking through things as I go.