what’s the physical meaning of mathematical operations?

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Let’s say you have a division. You’ve got 3/2, where 3 might be acres and 2 might be brothers so from there you could deduce that the division just means that the 3 acres of land will be distributed between two brothers. Summation and multiplication are quite straight forward, but what the hell does one do with multiplication and exponentiation? If I got 20 N-m of torque, wtf does the multiplication tells me there? If something follows a square root?

Please feel free to add any other operations to these. Thanks!

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Anonymous 0 Comments

I disagree with u/Melenduwir but it may come down to semantics: I think mathematical operations *do* have physical meaning. Take Einstein’s equation E=mc^(2) for example. We can read this as a sentence “Energy is Mass and they are related by a factor of c^(2)”. That equals sign is our human attempt to write down what the universe just does naturally (convert matter into energy like in stars).

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