The myth of Niels Bohr and the barometer question

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Water barometer
Source : Jean-Jacques MILAN
(Wikimedia commons)

In 1959 was published in the journal Pride of the American College Public Relations Association an essay entitled Angels on a Pin, by Alexander Calandra, professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. The story is about a physics student who surprises his professor on a simple question of physics.

« On almost every level, this essay falls apart on critical analysis. I wonder why it has become such a legend in the physics community ? »
Donald Simanek, emeritus professor of physics at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania.

The title is supposed to be a reference to medieval scholastics adept of meaningless questions such as How many angels can dance on the point of a pin ?
Personally, I see in this fable an illustration of the importance of creativity in sciences, a skill that is too rarely stimulated in the teaching of sciences, when it isn't consistently ignored...

The student is generally said to be Niels Henrik David Bohr (1885 - 1962), Nobel prize of Physics in 1922 and the referee is supposed to be the chemist Sir Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), Nobel prize of Chemistry in 1908, even if they didn't meet until Bohr finished his scholarship.

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A mathematician's lament

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« The most desperate are the most beautiful lament »

(Alfred de Musset, La nuit de Mai, 1835)

The keys of success...
Source : Photos Libres

A mathematician's lament (2002) is an article from Paul Lockhart, a first-class research mathematician and teacher at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, New York. Not only is it a critique of current K-12 mathematics education in the United States, but it's also a reminder that mathematics are also and above all an art, like music or beaux-arts. I invite you to read at least the two introductory pages.

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Seriously, what use is math ?

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Let's face it, no mathematician asks himself of what use is the discipline he works in every day, it's clear to him. But the thing is, it's not clear for everybody since the layman often asks the mathematician "what use is math ?". In this blog I'll attempt to answer this question with a bit of originality through... physics !


« Philosophy is written in this grand book - I mean the Universe - which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it. » G. Galilei, Il Saggiatore (The Assayer), 1623.


By the term "philosophy" used in this famous quote, we must of course understand "natural philosophy", which we now call "physical sciences". Note also that at the time of Galileo, mathematics were mainly about geometry and its figures. Nowadays, mathematics are also driven by rules about abstract objects depicted by symbols, "characters" of a formal language which is not what Galileo referred to.

A common paraphrase of this quote says that « Nature is a book written in mathematical language ». In my view, this interpretation insinuate a now foolhardy realism. If we were to distort the author's words, I would prefer to think that « Nature is a book that we know how to decipher only through mathematical language ».

This way, the role of mathematics is clear : they are an improvement and an extension of our thinking, and are then at the basis of our understanding of the world.

Of course this point of view is debatable, and I invite you to criticize me !

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