Dung
I was listening to something on the BBC a few months ago which was saying something similar to your title, I'll try and find it again.

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind;

[PLA, vol. 1, "Electrical Units of Measurement", 1883-05-03]

William Thompson, Lord Kelvin

3500BC?

I read that the wheel was unknown in South America until the Spaniards arrived.

It is not nice to see someone make a fool of himself. Please desist.

I'm not sure what you mean by the "Be All and End All". If it is that all science is mathematical, or that without maths there is no science, that seems false. Taxonomy is undeniably science but has little connection with maths beyond perhaps counting. I'm sure the same is true of many fields of biological science.

No Science without Maths? Absolutely not. Not sure why, and to whom, the word "fool" is mentioned here.

Science is principally about ideas and communicating them. Ideas are not defined my maths. Einstein cycling wasn't going through partial differential equations.

When I sit in the car with the boys and they ask me questions and we discuss science, no maths is involved.

Maths is a language, a communication language.

Of course, the more your idea can be communicated the more people will believe it. Maths is a mature, widely understood language.

Maths is no different than musical notation. Music does not need musical notation, it helps with the understanding, it helps with so many things. But the 80 year folk musician who knows 1000's of pieces but has never read music is just as valid as the conductor of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra.

Maths is just a language. A tool. And maths is not a science, ask any pure mathematician, it just is what it is.

Science can be communicated in many ways, many "languages".

Identifyng the origin of mathematics is uncertain. There are tally sticks 30,000 years old.

The Egyptians were surveying land ( maesuring land, geo-metry!) In 4000BC and they learned it from the Babylonians.

Is taxonomy a science?

No, it's not.

So here we go another one of my ways of explaining things... I knew you all couldn't wait.

Science like soap bubbles. So let me call them Science Bubbles.

"Oh no he is off again..."

Bear with me. Or not. Keeps me sane.

Assume all scientific knowledge is defined by soap, sorry science bubbles. For this argument bubbles can be any size and can grow. They can merge and they can split. They can group. They can be consumed, a smaller bubble existing inside a larger bubble.

Note: They are robust to normal soap bubbly bursting, it takes a unique event for them to burst.

Through human history science bubbles were created. At the start of mankind making sense of his world, these were spread around the world. 10,000 years ago in Siberia someone in his fish trap in the freezing cold river did have a Eureka moment.

But the bubble burst when the fisherman died. And his relatives either thought he was crazy or couldn't work out how to use his wonderful contraption. Burnt it for fire wood.

So as mankind progressed the instances of bubbles being created increased. Due to information sharing and persistence, bubbles could join in a group, they could merge into one, they could grow. All these bubbly things.

Scientific knowledge is the bubble mass. Forever changing shape, size, content.

And do not forget bubbles can also burst. The world is flat. Oops.

Galileo had his bubble, but he also had other bubbles joined to his, a group. The Church tried to prevent the flat earth bubble group earth from touching, tried to burst or split Galileo's bubble group with a pin. They failed.

Science Bubbles have a natural gravity. They are attracted to the centre of the bubble mass. Bubbles either complement each other (join, merge or subsume) or are incompatible. And in that instance bubbles burst. But from the bursting, bubbles are created again, that knowledge that still has some purpose.

A bubble can grow and grow, then a new scientific theory bubble comes along. It might be tiny, the tiniest bubble, and it comes into contact with this huge bubble, and POP, the huge bubble disappears, replaced by what? Maybe of smaller bubbles (of valid knowledge) they will float and reform and find a home.

And the process is continuously ongoing. The path to god is when the there is only one bubble and it has reached the size to encompass all scientific knowledge.

In fact this process works better if you can think in more than three dimensions, because then you have the ability to use a bubble more than once - for it to be in more than place at once.

Maths makes the bubble stronger. More robust. Maths makes the bubble polarisation easier, allowing easy connecting to compatible bubbles, but also the destruction of incompatible bubbles.

We have this huge area of the bubble mass relating to the Theory of Relativity. Some genuis riding his electric bike in Siberia, with an online internet connection will stumble upon the idea that might invalidate that. The smallest bubble. And it will grow on the internet, And maybe 5 days later the Einstein bubble is burst. Maybe a few large bubbles are created from the POP. Not all the knowledge is lost. it just has to reform into new bubble groups.

Science Bubbles.

And here is the point...

My previous post changed scientific knowledge. Caused something to change. Even if it is crap and irrelevant. We will probably find that most of our scientific knowledge is crap and irrelevant in 100,000 years time. The current bubble volume might be the tiniest fraction compared to then.

That post science was scientific knowledge. A small bubble. Set off to fend for itself. Maybe a very short life.

There was no maths involved at all.

So here is an intellectual exercise. And something I have thought about often, not totally related to science.

The young baby is cast-away alone on a desert island. The environment keeps it alive (adopted by animals, whatever).

She grows. And lives alone until she say is forty. No contact with any humans or humna knowledge. No language, no maths, nothing.

She is saved. At that point does she have any scientific ideas that can change scientific knowledge? She has no way of communicating them, but does she having something to contribute? Maybe she sat in the same place for 30 years and observed something. And because she has no language, no conditioning, maybe she sees the world differently? Sees something we cannot. Something so obvious but everyone has missed it.

She comes back to civilisation and 1 year later she can communicate in a language we all understand. And express her ideas. Maybe she will use maths as her main language of choice.

But the idea, the knowledge was on that desert island.

Ideas will always exist in at least one dimension higher than the language used to describe them.

I am amused that we have a thread where Dung agrees with Raff.

I have used translators all my career.

I realised fairly quickly that the dumbest people can speak a second language perfectly and is no sign of intelligence.

I actually preferred the technically dumb ones because they had no interest in anything I had to say. They learnt quickly a happy me is someone who has their words translated, nothing added, nothing lost.

And as I picked up the language myself I could surprise them when they strayed.

But then you encounter translators who thought they were the expert. Because they spoke the technical language. But they had no expertise, experience and usually they were from art degrees. With these they wanted to start discussions with you. Or if they were asked a question, they would answer it without translating.

And we all meet them, people who because they speak the language think they are experts in areas where it is used. And they look down on or exclude others who do not speak that level of language.

In the eyes of some, the inability to perform partial differentiation excludes you from contributing anything to science. There are some who inhabit this site, who are here because of that narrow superiority.

And the best scientists and physicists are those that do not hide behind that language. Be it maths or technical terms or three letter acronyms or consensus.