KC on Mathematics and Strings

I had a sinful lunch of coffee and delicate french pastries with the science writer KC Cole yesterday, at Michelle Myers' excellent French patisserie "Boule", over in West Hollywood. (The food is divine, but sometimes the counter service leaves a lot to be desired. They need to work on that. Oh well....) I was on my way to go and see the penultimate day of the MOCA part of the exhibition "Masters of American Comics", and she was taking a break from writing new material her commentaries on science. Actually, a new one aired last week on KPCC. It was about string theory, in fact, and you can find it here, along with earlier ones. In the commentary, she tries to counter the accusations made that string theory is all nonsense because it is just "mathematical navel-gazing" with no connection to reality. She does this by pointing out -quite correctly, I think- that it should not be forgotten that there's quite a history of marvellous scientific discovery coming straight from consquences of puzzling over mathematical structures. She gives the example, among others, of Dirac's discovery of anti-matter, which essentially came from wondering what was the meaning "the other sign choice" after taking a square root. (At this juncture, I'll also point you to a post I did last November about Einstein's decade of struggle to formulate General Relativity. Note: Anti- and Pro-string crowd: Let's try to go and read that discussion thoroughly before endlessly repeating old arguments all over again on this thread, ok?) She quite responsibly acknowledges -as I often do here when these types of discussion come up- that string theory is as yet an unfinished project, with lots of work to be done in order to understand if it has anything to do with Nature. But she wants to caution against dismissing something just because it's "just math", since mathematics plays such an important role in scientific discovery. She ends her piece by reminding us that mathematics -which is all about the science of patterns- plays a key role in understanding the universe (physical law is all about patterns, of course), and, following from a conversation with a mathematician friend of hers, she likens it to poetry.... both mathematics and poetry "take a universe of complexity and distill it to essential truth". -cvj