Physical Intuition vs. “Math” | Not Even Wrong (2024)

Posted on June 29, 2024 by woit

A common theme in discussions online of the problems of fundamental theoretical physics is that the subject has gotten “lost in math”, losing touch with “physical intuition”. In such discussions, when people refer to “math” it’s hard to figure out what they mean by this. In the case of Sabine Hossenfelder’s “Lost in Math” you can read her book and get some idea of what specifically she is referring to, but usually the references to “math” don’t come with any way of finding out what the person using the term means by it. Here I’ll mostly leave “math” in quotation marks, since the interesting issue of what this means is not being addressed.

“Physical intuition” is also a term whose meaning is not so clear. Sometimes I see it used in an obviously naive way, referring to our understanding of the physical world that comes from our everyday interaction with it and the feeling this gives us for how classical mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics work. Some people are quite devoted to the idea that this is the way to understand fundamental physics, sometimes taking this as far as skepticism about subjects like quantum mechanics.

Usually though, the term is not being used in this naive sense, but as meaning something more like “the sort of understanding of physical phenomena someone has who has spent a great deal of time working out many examples of how to apply physics theory, so can use this to see patterns and guess how some new example will work out”. This is contrasted to the person lacking such intuition, who will have to fall back on “math”, in this situation meaning writing down the general textbook equations and mathematically manipulating them to produce an answer appropriate for the given example, without any intuitive understanding of the result of the calculation. This is what we expect to see in students who are just learning a new subject, haven’t yet worked out enough examples to have the right intuition.

If the question though is not how to apply well understood fundamental theory to a new example, but how to come up with a better fundamental theory, I’d like to make the provocative claim that “physical intuition” is not going to be that helpful. New breakthroughs in fundamental theory have the characteristic of being unexpectedly different than earlier theory. The best way to come up with such breakthroughs is from new experimental results that conflict with the standard theory and point to a better one. But, what if you don’t have such results? It seems to me that in that case your best hope is “math”.

Here’s a list of the great breakthroughs of fundamental physics in the 20th century, with some comments on the role of “physical intuition” and “math”.

Special relativity: According to physical intuition, if I’m emitting a light ray and speed up in its direction, so will the the speed of the light ray. The crucial input was from experiment (Michelson-Morley), which showed that light always travels at the same speed. Finding a sensible theory of mechanics with this property was largely “math”.
General relativity: There’s a long argument about the role of “math” here, but I think the only way to develop “physical intuition” about curved spacetime is to start by learning Riemannian geometry (which Einstein did).
Quantum mechanics: Here again, a crucial role was played by experimental results, those on atomic spectra. A large part of the development of the subject was applying “math” to the mysterious spectra for which there was zero “physical intuition”. Later on, a better understanding of the theory and better calculational methods involved bringing in a large amount of new “math” to physics, especially the theory of unitary representations of groups.
Yang-Mills theory: This was pretty much pure “math”: replacing a U(1) gauge theory by an SU(2) gauge theory.
Gell-Mann’s eight-fold way: Pure “math”.
The Anderson-Higgs mechanism: The funny thing here is that Anderson did get this out of “physical intuition”, based on what he knew from superconductivity. Particle theorists ignored him (especially when it came time for a Nobel Prize), and their papers about this were often mainly “math”, more specifically argumentation about how the mathematics of gauge symmetry could give a loophole to a theorem (the Goldstone theorem).
The unified electroweak theory: Looks to me more like “math” than “physical intuition”.
QCD and asymptotic freedom: David Gross famously had the “physical intuition” that the effective coupling grows in the ultraviolet for all QFTs, based on experience with a wide range of examples. He set a mathematical problem for his student (Frank Wilczek), and when the “mathematics” was finally sorted out, they realized the usual physical intuition for QFTs had to be replaced by something completely different.

Making a list instead of the great disasters of 20th century theoretical physics, there’s

Supersymmetry: OK, this one is “math”. I suspect though that the problem here is that the “math” is not quite right, but missing some other needed new ideas.
String theory: As we’re told in countless books and TV programs, this starts with a new “physical intuition”: instead of taking point particles as primitive objects, take the vibrational modes of a vibrating string. Developing the implications of this certainly involves a lot of “math”, but the new fundamental idea is a physical one (and it’s wrong, but that’s a different story…).