Abstract: In this blog post I write about why I decided to study a degree in mathematical physics. During my study throughout the last few years, I have come to realise not only the beauty of abstract mathematics but also how important mathematics is in understanding physics and thus the truths of the universe.
Throughout my life, I’ve always wanted to know how the world worked, wondering why this or that is the case, leading me to become fascinated with the sciences in high school, and eventually drawing me to mathematical physics in university. These subjects explained why we see things the way we do on the macro scale, and there’s nearly always a reason that we ourselves cannot see, whether it be too large to comprehend or too small to imagine.
Physics, in particular, describes the rules that our universe must follow, and initially it’s intuitive; something will keep moving unless you act a force on it, things like that. But eventually it gets weird. You get things like superposition and wave-particle duality in quantum physics, and things like time dilation and relativity of simultaneity in special relativity. Even different fields of physics seem to disagree on what gravity truly is. Is it a force between two masses? Is it the natural movement of objects through a straight path in spacetime? Suffice to say that trying to understand the laws of the universe using good old macroscale intuition is extremely difficult if not impossible, and this is where mathematics comes in.
Mathematics is all about discovering results from a set of ground rules, called axioms. From just these few statements we can infer many things and consider abstract structures. One such structure is the Lie superalgebra, which I studied throughout my research project. We start with only the definition of the Lie superalgebra and a couple of rules it must obey, and from there we can discover some magnificent properties, which, like much of abstract mathematics, has its place in explaining weird physics. Mathematics is purely logical, everything is justified and proved based on the axioms. It just makes sense, so, when we view physics through a mathematical lens, some things become clearer. For instance, wave-particle duality will always be a strange property of our universe, but the familiarity and logic of its underlying mathematics allow it to seem less so.
This is why I’ve decided to study mathematical physics. There is beauty to be found in the abstract structures studied throughout mathematics, but it is also essential to understanding physics and the laws of our universe.
James Lonnen
The University of Melbourne
