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thomblake comments on Configurations and Amplitude - Less Wrong
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Instead of talking about details, I'd like to remind you of the big picture.
You think physicists get it wrong and you get it right. That is not completely impossible. However, based on the theories of physicists we have a lot of stuff that works: planes that fly, microwaves that heat, GPS devices that measure your position. So if their theories are wrong, how do you explain that all this stuff, built on their theories, works? Their theories, if not completely correct, must be at least approximately correct, or mathematically equivalent to correct, right? So even if they make errors, they surely do not make obvious errors. However, what you write, suggests that there is a big difference. How is it possible, if you are right, that a theory so different from yours can still produce all the stuff that works?
(To compare, LW contains a few discussions on many-worlds hypothesis versus collapse hypothesis, but those two are mathematically equivalent. In other case, an experiment could be done that decides between them, and someone would probably have done it decades ago.)
In short, the hypothesis User:Monkeymind advanced (somewhere in that rambling mess) was that engineers do not base their technological work on math, but instead on trial-and-error. This is obviously an empirical question. Monkeymind offered as evidence that he himself has a bad grasp of mathematics and yet has built various devices using trial-and-error.
It's a potentially interesting idea. Do we have any real evidence that mathematics is a necessary component of the development of these devices? Anecdotally Norbert Wiener used mathematics to shoot down Japanese planes using radar.
Not that we have a really good alternative. Physical theories have been preferred for being more mathematically elegant ever since Newton, and before that we didn't really have physical theories. I think that Monkeymind's insistence that science is not for making predictions might be a hint that we're just talking about different things here.
We've been over this already.
Doesn't look like a definitive answer to me, though it does answer somewhat for that particular example.
Agreed, it's not definitive. The best way to answer this would probably be to round up a bunch of engineers and ask them how much they use math. That would give us a quick average estimate of how today's engineers use math. Unless you're interested in specific important discoveries in engineering, in which case it would make more sense to examine the most influential breakthroughs case-by-case.
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A hypothesis that collapses into category-erroneous incoherence as soon as you realize that math can also be done via trial-and-error.
I personally am a programmer, but the software I write (as well as other software, written by smarter people) is used by genetic engineers. They engineer plants for specific desired traits (stronger drought resistance, bigger fruit, whatever). To do this, they use a ton of conventional math (statistics, specifically), as well as numerical optimization methods (such as neural networks) in order to determine (simplistically speaking) which nucleotides on the genome have an effect on which trait.
A single chromosome of corn consists of about 200,000,000 nucleotides. Good luck with that trial and error !