this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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Asklemmy
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"intelligence is a nuanced topic" Understatement champion. Applying your examples "in any form" still doesn't really work since those examples are built on communicating the steps as well as the result. If an animal can intuit precision without showing the work, do we still give credit for intelligence? Jumping spiders, for example, have an extremely developed intuition for parabolic trajectories, but I'd bet real money there's no neural structure in their brains that looks like y^2 = 4ax.
And yet every professional physicist will tell you that physics IS math, and that if you don't understand the math, you canβt understand physics, and shouldn't try.
As a physicist, physics is not math. Math is a tool you can use to do physics, but you can absolutely do physics without it. In fact, qualitative physics is the best kind.