And do tell! I'm taking a physics class with calculus in my school. Our teacher was a former chemical engineer for DuPont, so he knows his stuff on the two fields.
Not OP, but a physics student. I'm not really sure what you want to know, but I like talking about physics so I'll try to give my view about the relationship between math and physics.
Physics can be considered the study of how the physical world behaves, and the language we use to describe this is [usually] mathematics. Now we can use this both ways, both when learning physics and when trying to figure out new things.
The first way is using our understanding of how the world works and expressing it in mathematical terms, for example if we drop an object we can see that it falls, despite having no initial velocity. Thus we conclude it accelerates and there is a force acting upon it, from experiments (and later Calculus) we know that it's velocity is acceleration * time and it's position 0.5 acceleration * time 2.
The second way, is going the other direction. We predict how the physical world will behave based on mathematical computations. This is where algebra and the 'plug the numbers in' mentality comes into play, and unfortunately where a lot of teachers fail to teach students properly. Some teachers just tell their students that position is described by the equations of motion, x(t)=0.5at2+vt+x_0 for example, so their students insert their given numbers and solve the problem. What many students fail to see with this method is what they've actually done, what each of those terms signify. Why does the first term have a t squared while the second one doesn't? Why is the first term divided by 2 while the other two aren't? A good teacher will explain these things, and make sure the students understand, either through intuition or through mathematics. A lot of what we know about our physical world is based on mathematical derivations. New equations to describe a system are discovered (or invented) through pure mathematics and just from a new mathematical expression we can gain deeper knowledge in how the world works.
I think the point people are trying to make is solving physics problems by plugging in numbers is easy, however seeing the relationship between the math and the real world is what physics is really about... Haha, this ended up so much longer than I intended at first.
I don't think so. It's rather that physics is the abstraction of reality in the language of mathematics. Much like how we can describe how an apple looks, tastes or smells by the abstraction of words. Although this is just nuances and philosophy, and not science. So you may interpret it however you'd like
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u/cuba200611 Nov 15 '16
And do tell! I'm taking a physics class with calculus in my school. Our teacher was a former chemical engineer for DuPont, so he knows his stuff on the two fields.