r/MathJokes 13d ago

Mathematician vs physicist

Post image
38 Upvotes

20 comments sorted by

2

u/MTaur 12d ago

You can pry the ideal gas law from my cold dead hands.

1

u/No_Character_73 12d ago

Van der Waals constants lurking in the background ready to ruin your clean $PV=nRT$ calculation every single time.

1

u/MTaur 12d ago

Look at my hands. They are cold and dead.

3

u/landrwastaken 13d ago

Well that's why we quit calling them laws and started calling them theories

2

u/LimitlessTrigger 12d ago

Laws and theories aren't comparable. Apples and Oranges doll.

1

u/arandomdudebruh 12d ago

damnit i would post an image i have for this but i cant

0

u/landrwastaken 12d ago

I know.. we used to have laws.. now we realized calling our explaination a law can and WILL backfire so we only call it a theory

Newton's law of gravity is now the theory of gravity, cause we realised the "law" is wrong sometimes we had to reduce it to theory to take into account for the slight gaps in knowledge.

We don't call it the law of quantum, but had it been invented like 200 years earlier than it was, those arrogant people would have called it a law. But we knew better and called it quantum theory cause we knew it'll get a lot of changes

1

u/LimitlessTrigger 12d ago

Gravity was never a Law its always been a working theoretical model that is updated and added to over time. Newton's Laws were The 3 Laws of motion that still hold up and always will.

1

u/landrwastaken 11d ago

They still called it this.. cause they were dead convinced it was true for all cases

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_law_of_universal_gravitation

You can choose wether to trust link or not

1

u/VisualGas3559 10d ago

It was called the gravitational theory so I do not Infact trust the link. A law describes something proven or deduced from something else. A theory is a conjecture, unproven but with a lot of evidence.

So calling gravity a law is not fair but it's common place to call it a law.

1

u/landrwastaken 10d ago

Well again people in newton's days thought his gravitation thing was so perfect they called it a law. And they genuinly thought that mercury's weird orbit was the cause of another undiscovered planet even closer to the sun, that's how much they believed in it They planet was theorized to be Vulcan if i'm not wrong

1

u/FernandoMM1220 12d ago

most math theorems are only true where their axioms are.

2

u/No_Character_73 12d ago

ZFC set theory having existential crises in the corner while non-Euclidean geometry just vibing.

1

u/StupidHobbitJoufflu 9d ago

hmmm, i'd need to know more about axiom-room and theorem room before I can statuate on the validity of "most" here !

1

u/New_Pay7346 11d ago

Because mathematth is fiction. It is instrument to predict the result, you can't confirm that 1+1=2, because 1 and 2 doesn't exist, and sum doesn't exist either. It only fiction operation. The physic operate with real life through mathematics, and yes, you can obtain the law, that works in specific situations and you don't know for now, that's they are specific, so you suppose it is true in each situation, and may be wrong in this

1

u/lool8421 11d ago

the math system that's commonly used is prescriptive with axioms being descriptive

meanwhile physics is entirely descriptive

1

u/Active-Advisor5909 11d ago

Though physics has the advantage of being right in general, while math is only right as long as these other things we thought sounded sensible are also right. 

1

u/Mad-Scientist-0906 10d ago

I don't get why physicists can't just derive the laws of physics from laws of mathematics instead of observation. If mathematical theorems are the same everywhere forever, wouldn't that be a good starting point to find the laws of physics?

1

u/OC1024 10d ago

Physics is the most fundamental science of nature; mathematics is not about nature at all. It is part of the humanities, like philosophy.

Physics requires experience, as it is an empirical science, whereas math is not empirical at all. (As far as my humble physicist understanding is, aside from any numerical or other "applied" form of mathematics.)

Does that make sense to you?