Unfortunately there are many ways one can fool oneself into believing all sorts of asinine things with numbers. That was the point of the lesson: That math is effectively meaningless without an earnest desire to arrive at the correct answer, not just an attempt to confirm what one already believes. This article is actually a great example of that, because it presumes that our mathematical models are definitely correct, which is the farthest thing from the truth. Physics is a really interesting field because it’s constantly discovering odd nuances of our world where our models don’t actually align with reality, giving us the chance to improve them.
On the contrary, fundamental physics has been completely static for half a century. That doesn’t really have much to do with your main point, though.
I mean, you’re right in statistics, and statistics comes up constantly, but there’s no way to directly prove there’s only 100 prime numbers, for example. In number theory, there’s absolute truths, and a correct proof will inevitably align with them.
In statistics and with arbitrarily questionable assumptions that might be true, but there’s other math.
Unfortunately there are many ways one can fool oneself into believing all sorts of asinine things with numbers. That was the point of the lesson: That math is effectively meaningless without an earnest desire to arrive at the correct answer, not just an attempt to confirm what one already believes. This article is actually a great example of that, because it presumes that our mathematical models are definitely correct, which is the farthest thing from the truth. Physics is a really interesting field because it’s constantly discovering odd nuances of our world where our models don’t actually align with reality, giving us the chance to improve them.
On the contrary, fundamental physics has been completely static for half a century. That doesn’t really have much to do with your main point, though.
I mean, you’re right in statistics, and statistics comes up constantly, but there’s no way to directly prove there’s only 100 prime numbers, for example. In number theory, there’s absolute truths, and a correct proof will inevitably align with them.