I keep on thinking that everything around us is basically just information. Be it DNA, atoms, or spacetime itself. And math is the set of rules that explain the interaction, flow and existence of this information. We did not uncover all the rules yet. Does this make sense?
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Maths is sort of just studying sets of rules in general. Some sets of rules are useful for describing the real world, others aren’t. The “useful” ones, when applied, are basically the foundations of what we call theoretical physics.
This is an important distinction: Physics is science, maths isn’t. Physics studies the real world and lets you predict what happens and you can build experiments around statements in physics (experimentation is one of the key defining features of science). Maths is “just” one of the tools physicists use to describe the world.
Also, it’s important to note that this is a matter of _describing_ the real world. Some descriptions are better than others. E.g. Newton’s description of motion is less sophisticated than Einstein’s. This doesn’t mean that Newton’s is “wrong” or useless, just that it’s not accurate in extreme circumstances. Einstein’s way of describing motion (relativity) is much more sophisticated and can handle star-sized objects moving at nearly the speed of light, but it’s much more cumbersome, and not meaningfully more accurate, for describing day-to-day stuff on Earth.
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