I'm not anti-math. We need it. It's powerful. It predicts many
things successfully and will continue to do so long after all of
us are dead and buried (or scattered).
But there will come a day where we will need to move past
spherical horses. Let me find that joke. Milk production at a
dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university,
asking for help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of
professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and
two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The
scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with
data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team
leader. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm,
saying to the farmer, "I have the solution, but it only works in
the case of spherical cows in a vacuum". I'm not a "point-like"
thing; there _are_ no point-like things.
It's a useful analogy; a substitution.
It's awesome and amazing and deserves our every respect, but not
worship. We're moving towards worship of mathematics as a
society and I'm just hoping to play some part in keeping things
reasonable
