> Physics uses math, the way that a car mechanic uses a wrench without worrying about its atomic structure. I disagree. The way I see it is that (non-mathemat

> Physics uses math, the way that a car mechanic uses a wrench without worrying about its atomic structure. I disagree. The way I see it is that (non-mathematically inclined) physicists often try to fix a car using a wrench and while they get the car working in the end, it's actually not the wrench that did the job (as they claim) but the fact that they kicked the car in anger multiple times that accidentally rearranged some of the screws in the right way. Put differently: Physicists often try to derive statement C from statement A while silently assuming the non-trivial statement B which is actually the crucial point and contains important assumptions about the physics. Or, even worse, they sometimes "prove" statement C from a slightly rephrased and trivially equivalent statement C' that already (silently) contains the crucial statements A and B and they don't even notice that what they're doing is tautological and doesn't prove anything. And then there're those cases where they want to derive statement A from statement B and make a really crude (and actually completely wrong) argument to do so when actually B follows from A and not the other way around, i.e. they started with the wrong assumption (B instead of A). Often, A is a very general math statement and B is a crude physicist's version of it, applied to a special case. I guess what I'm saying is: A lot of physicists suck at logic and confuse cause and effect because they don't know enough math. Certainly, this might affect theoretical physics more than applied or experimental physics where results are usually well-established and all that counts is the numerical result. But in theoretical physics it really clouds one's view of what is actually happening. Source: I'm a student of theoretical and mathematical physics.