An interesting New York Times Essay, “When Even Mathematicians Don’t Understand the Math”, delves into the complexities of modern mathematics that seem to defy description to a lay audience, or even real understanding by mathematicians themselves. Many of these complex constructs lie at the heart of attempts to explain our natural world, for example in the physicists’ “String Theory”. Is there really a dilemma here, that our brains can construct things that we cannot then understand? Do such constructs actually constitute “explanation” of the world?

The Times essay quotes Dr. John Casti, author of Five Golden Rules: Great Theories of 20th-Century Mathematics and Why They Matter.:

“It isn’t science. Mathematics is an intellectual activity – at a linguistic level, you might say – whose output is very useful in the natural sciences. I think the criteria that mathematicians use for what constitutes good versus bad mathematics is much more close to that of a poet or a sculptor or a musician than it is to a chemist.”

Hmm, does that give us another explanation for the decline of US science?