How Modern Maths Reveals Nature’s Deepest Secrets
The supreme task of the physicist,’ Einstein declared, ‘is to arrive at the fundamental laws from which that universe can be built up by pure deduction.’ In The Universe Speaks in Numbers, Graham describes how Einstein’s successors are seeking these laws of nature with the help not only of new experimental results but also of cutting-edge mathematics.
At the heart of the search for a better understanding of nature is pattern-making, which is also central to mathematics. Theoretical physicists aim to discover natural laws – patterns among quantities relating to measurements made in experiments and observations. By contrast, the patterns sought by mathematicians may have nothing to do with reality. Remarkably – some say miraculously – the patterns that most interest contemporary mathematicians have proved to be successful in helping theoretical physicists to understand nature at the deepest level.
Isaac Newton supplied the first workable framework for the subject now known as theoretical physics. Graham describes how Newton, James Clerk Maxwell and their modern-day successors have applied mathematics – much of it new to them – in their quest to understand the order underlying the universe.
While researching the book, Graham visited several of the world’s leading centres of research in physics and mathematics and spoke with many top-drawer theoretical physicists, mathematicians and historians of science. Many of these experts commented that physics and mathematics have never been more intertwined, each subject shedding light on the other. Perhaps, as the physicist Paul Dirac suggested, mathematics and physics will one day unify?