Listen to the lecture and answer the following questions.

1. How did Leibniz define the relationship between music and math?

2. What mathematical parameters are involved in the composition of music?

3. What do music and mathematics have in common?

4. How are the perception of music and mathematics related in terms of brain activity?

5. What kind of freedom do mathematics and music share?

 

 

UNIT 6 THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE

Read the text and decide whether the following statements are true (T) or false (F).

1. It is essential for the modern science, specifically physics, that the discovered laws can be written in the form of mathematical formulae.

2. Physicists believe that there should be an equation underpinning every fundamental laws of nature.

3. Equations are part of every modern science.

4. Physics heavily relies on equations as its tool.

5. The most efficient approach of a physicist is to reduce complex things to their simple underlying structures.

6. The importance of equations varies in different sciences.

 

Equations in Science

 

  The idea that science advances through a combination of experiment and mathematically based theory is relatively new. Since Galileo’s time, science has become more mathematical. Equations are now hugely important scientific tool and it is virtually an a article of faith for most theoreticians – certainly for most physicists – that there exists a fundamental equation to describe the phenomenon they are studying or that someone some day will find a suitable equation. Yet, as Feynman was fond of speculating, it may eventually turn out that fundamental laws of nature do not need to be stated mathematically and that they are better expressed in other ways, like the rules governing a game of chess.

  For now, it seems that equations offer the most effective way of expressing most fundamental scientific laws. But equations are not the preoccupation of all scientists, many of whom do well with only rudimentary acquaintance of mathematics. This point is made in the joke about physicist, an engineer, and a biologist when someone asks each of them about the numerical value of π. The mathematician responds crisply that it is equal to the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter”. The physicist counters that it is 3,141593, give or take 0.000001”. The engineer says it is “about 3”. The biologists ask, “What’s π ?”

     This is of course a caricature. Some physicists have little mathematics, some engineers are brilliant at in their ability to apply mathematics to their work, and some theoretical biologists are hotshot mathematicians. However, like all caricatures, it has a kernel of truth. Engineers tend to have a utilitarian attitude to mathematics, and place a high premium on making good approximations. And of all sciences, physics is the most mathematical, biology the least.

   Since Galileo’s time, physicists have flourished mainly by keeping things simple, by breaking down the complexities of the everyday world into their simplest component parts. Such reductionism is not always an option for biologists, whose subject is the hugely complicated living world, with its interrelated communities of organisms, every one of which has a hugely complex structure in molecular terms.

And let us not forget that the unifying theory of biology is, superficially at least, non-mathematical – The Origin of Species, Darwin’s account of his theory of evolution by natural selection, does not contain a single equation. The same is true for geologists’ theory of continental drift, whose early papers (published soon after World War I) were virtually an equation-free zone.

  Mathematical equations are not the only type of equations used by scientists. Chemists, for example, use equations that are not written solely in terms of mathematical symbols but in terms of letters representing atoms, molecules and their subatomic relatives. A huge amount of industrial activity is based on chemical equations like this, each one describing an interaction whose details can be inferred but almost never observed with a naked eye.

 

2. Give synonyms to the following words:

 

relatively                   originate                    scientist               proceeds                       range                      precise                       entire                  hugely speculate                     offer                           rudimentary                  kernel

breaking down            solely                             infer                        almost

 

 

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