LANGUAGE, as Robyn Arianrhod points out, profoundly affects what we see in the world. And, because the language of nature appears to be mathematics, we are pretty much blind if we don’t know that language.
In Einstein’s Heroes, Arianrhod drives home her point with the example of James Clerk Maxwell. While other 19th-century physicists insisted on imagining the world in terms of everyday “mechanical” models, Maxwell alone realised that Faraday’s “fields” of electricity and magnetism could only truly be visualised by mathematics. They had no analogue in the everyday world.
It was a pivotal, liberating moment in the history of…
