Question

Physicist can build mathematical or mechanical models to describe a system. It is really a matter of choice. Mechanical models use mathematics but the processes and transformations describing the system are highly visual. Mathematicians are shaping physics. Mathematician’s influence on physics became profound during the 1920’s with the birth of modern quantum mechanics. Hilbert, Born, Heisenberg, Dirac and others produced mathematical models for quantum mechanics that are inherently abstract. This abstractness was not the norm prior to the 1920’s. Mechanical models were the preferred tools of physicist because in these models, processes and transformations are not abstract and can be manipulated to build new technologies. Mathematical models describe systems but what is actually occurring as it relates to processes and transformations is unclear and does not lend itself very well to manipulation at the deepest levels. Physicist can only bring new insights to geometry because unlike other branches of mathematics, geometry is talking about something real (space). Space is real and not abstract. Witten is smart and so are many other individuals who have failed to give any new testable insights into how real space works beyond Einstein.