ABSTRACT

Physicists secretly know their subject to be superior to any other empirical science. It is engrained into the culture of the subject that physics and physicists can bring insights into other sciences, but that the reverse is not true. Physicists become biologists, but biologists do not become physicists. There are master’s degrees available for moving from undergraduate physics into the life sciences, but not for moves in the opposite direction. It is also understood in pectore, even if never to be uttered explicitly, that the reason for this is that physicists are just, well, smarter.1 Why, after all, did the discovery of DNA, the most important discovery of twentieth century biology, take place within a physics laboratory? As physicists, we are the best. We have the right stuff. We are the elect of every nation. We are Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory.

There is one subject which is exempted from this benign condescension. That subject is mathematics. Mathematics is, together with astronomy, the most ancient of the sciences, with origins that predate recorded history. It is not an empirical science. The truths of its statements are not contingent on the results of any experiment carried out in this world. They are instead accessible to pure thought, starting from well-defined premises and moving to well-defined conclusions. In the language of philosophy, the truths of mathematics are analytic rather than synthetic.