“Newton screwed physics by pushing a non-mechanistic theory of gravity, which le

–“Newton screwed physics by pushing a non-mechanistic theory of gravity, which led to increasing mathiness in physics up to the modern day. Huygens and his student Liebniz were skeptical, being mechanical philosophers in the tradition of Descartes.”–@LiminalRev

Correct, though I might argue that in general the direction was correcting, but Einstein and Bohr weren’t (sufficiently) corrected by Bridgman and Brouwer. The fact that Descartes restored mathematics from langauge to measurement, and in some sense brought about mathematical nominalism was poisoned.

I like the term mechanical philosophers or mechanical mathematics, I use the term from the intuitionist-operationalist revolution, and so use the term ‘operational’. But the concept you’re referring to is the same.

Under mathematical nominalism, mathematics is just an other (very limited) language (paradigm, vocabulary, grammar) of scale and context independence, a creation of the human mind, designed to categorize, quantify, and describe the empirical world. Mathematical terms and concepts are seen as useful fictions that facilitate understanding and communication about the natural world. Mathematical entities do not exist in any real sense but are merely names or labels for groups of objects or concepts. As such a science of measurement. Or in the literature “Empirical Mathematics”.

Unfortunately there is a very human tendency to treat mathematical referents as existential, which then restores platonism, and that is what, I agree, newton, einstein, bohr, and for that matter, Cantor. Had Hilbert and Einstein not conversed, pressing Einstein to publish, Hilberty might have saved us from over fifty years of failed physics.

Instead they ignore the quantum background (the aether) and invent a mathematical object space time and were no longer engaging in physics.

Reply addressees: @LiminalRev