I bet this is what Feynman meant when he said that calculus is the language God talks. From the old elements of earth, air, fire, and water to the latest in electrons, quarks, black holes, and superstrings, every inanimate thing in the universe bends to the rule of differential equations. Ever since Newton, we have found that the same pattern holds whenever we uncover a new part of the universe. Today we call them Newton’s laws of motion and gravity. He found that the orbits of the planets, the rhythm of the tides, and the trajectories of cannonballs could all be described, explained, and predicted by a small set of differential equations. Isaac Newton was the first to glimpse this secret of the universe.
Related Segment Steven Strogatz On The ‘Infinite Powers’ Of Calculus Calculus taps into this order and expresses it.
#INFINITE POWERS CODE#
To put this awesome assertion another way, there seems to be something like a code to the universe, an operating system that animates everything from moment to moment and place to place. The details differ depending on what part of nature we’re talking about, but the structure of the laws is always the same. Such equations describe the difference between something right now and the same thing an instant later or between something right here and the same thing infinitesimally close by. In any case, it’s a mysterious and marvelous fact that our universe obeys laws of nature that always turn out to be expressible in the language of calculus as sentences called differential equations. Or maybe it’s the only way a universe with us in it could be, because nonmathematical universes can’t harbor life intelligent enough to ask the question. “It’s the language God talks.”įor reasons nobody understands, the universe is deeply mathematical. After the interview, as they were parting, Feynman asked Wouk if he knew calculus.
Wouk was doing research for a big novel he hoped to write about World War II, and he went to Caltech to interview physicists who had worked on the bomb, one of whom was Feynman. The essence of the answer lies in a quip that the physicist Richard Feynman made to the novelist Herman Wouk when they were discussing the Manhattan Project.
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