mukund shyam

Whether rightly or wrongly (a debate that I don't want to get into), science and math is given a lot more importance than other subjects (i.e. the humanities).

But I believe that the humanities are given a lot less importance than they actually deserve.

According to Wikipedia, humanities "are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture", while science "is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe".

If you think about it at a deeper level, the sciences and the humanities have the same aim: to figure out how a) we work, and how b) the universe works.

While sciences try to get concrete structures to figure out how the world works, humanities rely more on abstract hypotheses and predictions.

For example, we know that force = mass x acceleration. This is a concrete structure put into place by science.

On the other hand, we know that you shouldn't attack Russia in the winter. This is not a law, per se; but more like a guideline. If you want to, you can definitely attack Russia in the winter; especially with the advances in technology, but you probably should not. Ethical issues are a whole different scope. The ethics of war has also evolved a lot over the last 100 years, and so has the general outlook of the world towards war. But I digress.

This is turning into quite a ramble-y blog post.

Anyway, back to the task at hand.

If you think about it, the core concepts of biology is chemistry. The core concepts of chemistry is physics. The core concepts of physics is math.

So what are the core concepts of math?

Well, there probably isn't anything like that. The core concepts of math are unique to math, but what is not unique to math is its idea.

The idea of math is to use data to figure out certain aspects of the world. At a higher level, too; the idea of science is to figure out how the world works.

But why do we even need to figure out how the world works?

That question is answered by philosophy.

It's not just seen in the relationship between science and philosophy though.

The humanities and the sciences are very tightly intertwined.

More often than not, if you want to figure out why something happened 100 years ago, you can figure that out in history. You can go deeper by using geography, and political science, and ethics and philosophy. If you want to go deeper than that, you use science.

Science only exist because humanities does, and humanities are only as useful as they are because science exists.

Both of them are really important for understanding why the world works.

Anyway, I don't really know what this blog post is about really. I just wrote what was on my mind.

Science and humanities are connected in many many ways, and you can't learn one without the other. Knowing both gives you a knowledge of the world that is very unique compared to what others have.

This was most definitely a ramble-y post. But I digress.

Thanks for reading.