Statement of Interest

Science is a terrifically successful method for human beings to connect

to the external world. The products of science aim at simplicity,
coherence, rigour and precision. Yet it remains a mysterious discipline
often considered as profoundly accessible to only a few ‘genius’ minds.
I find myself greatly intrigued and frustrated by this aristocratic
appearance of science. If science describes the “way things are”, then
its theories should be accessible to all, because no one has a privileged
access to the ways of the external world.
One reason for the undemocratic nature of science is its great
dependence on mathematics. The problem with such a language is
that as it becomes increasingly complex, it becomes increasingly
difficult to have any feel for how it is operating. This can be illustrated
with an example. According to the law of universal gravitation, a
heavy body M exerts a greater gravitational attraction on another body
B than a lighter one, m. This relationship is characterised
mathematically as a multiplication. M× B is greater than m× B. This
accords well with our feel for the situation. Multiplication increases
quantities (when they are larger than 1) and seems suitable to express
the link between an increased mass and an increased attraction.
However, it is far from clear how a similar story can be told about how
the application of a variational principal to an abstract quantity known
as the action results in accurate mathematical predictions about the
oscillations of a pendulum. It seems fair to say that at this point, feel
has stopped and some form of pure mathematical reasoning has taken
over. This line of enquiry leads to some questions about the role of
mathematics in physics. In Science without numbers, Hartry Field
attempts to develop a framework in which the laws of Newtonian
physics can be expressed without mathematical help. This endeavour
is motivated by a form of nominalism, which consists in the belief that
abstract entities (a class that includes mathematical entities) do not
exist. Indeed, it would be unacceptable for our sciences to have
entities that do not exist as their fundamental building blocks.
There are more examples that illustrate the peculiar role intuition
and mathematics play in the development of physical theory. James
Clerk Maxwell, when working on his theory of electromagnetism, was
greatly influenced by thoughts about tiny cogs turning in the ether that
were responsible for spreading the magnetic force. These small
turning cogs can be used to provide a feel for how the curl operator,
which is used to describe the magnetic field, works. However, it has
since been established that there is no ether, and no cogs, but
Maxwell’s mathematical description still stands. It is intriguing that
although incorrect, Maxwell’s intuitions for the mechanisms at work in
electromagnetism served him greatly in developing his equations,
which are the foundations of modern electrodynamics.
 The role of mathematics in the history of classical mechanics is
also curious. Although this field is typically associated with Newton,
there are many equivalent but fundamentally different ways of arriving
at the equations of motion for objects that obey Newton’s laws. Two of
these involve applying variational principles to quantities known as
Lagrangians and Hamiltonians. These methods are advantageous
because they allow for easier computation of the solutions. But more
importantly, the development of Hamiltonians allowed the transition
into quantum mechanics. This multitude of equivalent but different
methods for describing the same physical phenomenon strikes me as
worrying because it implies there is not a one to one map of correct
mathematical descriptions onto the physical phenomena described.
This implies a certain “arbitrariness” as to which mathematical
descriptions are really the correct ones and the progress of physics
seems at the mercy of the creativity of mathematicians. There is an
argument to be made that Einstein would never have formulated his
theory of general relativity had a framework for non-Euclidean
geometry not already been established. These tools allowed him to
express his ideas or maybe even more strongly, realise that his ideas
could be expressed at all… Over a century earlier, Kant had believed
that it was impossible for us to even conceive of a world that did not
conform to Euclidean geometry because the very fact of what we now
refer to as linear isotropic space was built into our cognitive
mechanisms and mediated our relationship with things ‘as they are’ (or
‘in themselves’ as Kant puts it).
Although Kantian ideas about time and space being a priori
intuitions are widely criticised, they may be useful in explaining
common sense thinking. Common sense is also a way for humans to
connect to the world and seems to me to be the source of the elusive
feel. It has the advantage over science that it provides rapid and quick
judgements and in everyday life serves quite well. In order to establish
why science does not sit well with common sense, and to attempt to
devise a method that allows for some intuitive understanding of
mathematical entities such as curls and least action integrals, it will be
useful to understand better the mechanisms that drive “ordinary
thinking”. George Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory may be a good
place to start for an analysis of this “everyday thinking”. Common
sense is also mediated by our perceptual mechanisms. In this way, a
look at recent advances in perceptual and cognitive science should
shed some light on the development of intuitions. Recent research
shows that mathematics is not as free from the intuitions of perception
as some Platonists would like to believe. For example, in Visual
Thinking in Mathematic, Marcus Giaquinto shows that the way
perceptual information is structured in the brain can have a significant
impact on how we arrive at mathematical understanding.
 These are the outlines for an ambitious project that seeks to
understand the unapproachable and counter-common sense nature of
science (especially physics) through an analysis of the role of
mathematics in scientific theory and the cognitive development of
common sense. An equally ambitious goal would be to use this
research to develop a method that allowed for complex mathematical
descriptions of physical phenomena to become more intuitive. In other
words, to devise a method that would allow us to have some feel for
the work that mathematical mechanisms are doing.
I believe I am well qualified to embark on such research. By June
2010, I will have completed three years at King’s College London (KCL)
studying physics and philosophy as well as a year abroad at the
University of California Berkeley where I took courses in physics,
philosophy, maths and political science. One of the physics courses,
analytical mechanics, was a detailed study of Lagrangian, Hamiltonian
and Hamilton-Jacobi theory. I already have a taste for self-directed
academic research. In the summer of 2008, I worked for the physics
department at KCL researching and writing a paper about the lives and
scientific contributions of three (two Nobel prize winning) physics
alumni. I found this work enriching and stimulating. I am intensely
interested in understanding how humans arrive at scientific knowledge
and would be prepared to dedicate my career as a university
researcher and teacher to this goal.