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| We are connected to the universe through mathematics… Photo: Universe Today |
Let us discuss the very nature of the cosmos. What you may find in this discussion is not what you expect. Going into a conversation about the universe as a whole, you would imagine a story full of wondrous events such as stellar collapse, galactic collisions, strange occurrences with particles, and even cataclysmic eruptions of energy. You may be expecting a story stretching the breadth of time as we understand it, starting from the Big Bang and landing you here, your eyes soaking in the photons being emitted from your screen. Of course, the story is grand. But there is an additional side to this amazing assortment of events that oftentimes is overlooked; that is until you truly attempt to understand what is going on. Behind all of those fantastic realizations, there is a mechanism at work that allows for us to discover all that you enjoy learning about. That mechanism is mathematics, and without it the universe would still be shrouded in darkness. In this article, I will attempt to persuade you that math isn’t some arbitrary and sometimes pointless mental task that society makes it out to be, and instead show you that it is a language we use to communicate with the stars.
We are currently bound to our solar system. This statement is actually better than it sounds, as being bound to our solar system is one major step up from being bound simply to our planet, as we were before some very important minds elected to turn their geniuses toward the heavens. Before those like Galileo, who aimed his spyglass towards the sky, or Kepler discovering that planets move about the sun in ellipses, or Newton discovering a gravitational constant, mathematics was somewhat limited, and our understanding of the universe rather ignorant. At its core, mathematics allows a species bound to its solar system to probe the depths of the cosmos from behind a desk. Now, in order to appreciate the wonder that is mathematics, we must first step back and briefly look at its beginnings and how it is integrally tied into our very existence.
Mathematics almost certainly came about from very early human tribes (predating Babylonian culture which is attributed to some of the first organized mathematics in recorded history), that may have used math as a way of keeping track of lunar or solar cycles, and keeping count of animals, food and/or people by leaders. It is as natural as when you are a young child and you can see that you have one toy plus one other toy, meaning you have more than one toy. As you get older, you develop the ability to see that 1+1=2, and thus simple arithmetic seems to be interwoven into our very nature. Those that profess that they don’t have a mind for math are sadly mistaken because just as we all have a mind for breathing, or blinking, we all have this innate ability to understand arithmetic. Mathematics is both a natural occurrence and a human designed system. It would appear that nature grants us this ability to recognize patterns in the form of arithmetic, and then we systematically construct more complex mathematical systems that aren’t obvious in nature but let us further communicate with nature.
All this aside, mathematics developed alongside of human development, and carried on similarly with each culture that was developing it simultaneously. It’s a wonderful observation to see that cultures that had no contact with one another were developing similar mathematical constructs without conversing. However, it wasn’t until mankind decidedly turned their mathematical wonder towards the sky that math truly began to develop in an astonishing way. It is by no mere coincidence that our scientific revolution was spurred by the development of more advanced mathematics built not to tally sheep or people, but rather to further our understandings of our place within the universe. Once Galileo began measuring the rates at which objects fell in an attempt to show mathematically that the mass of an object had little to do with the speed in which it fell, mankind’s future would forever be altered.
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Source: Universe Today
