Mathematics – Is Physics Rigorous in the Mathematical Sense?

Question

I am a student studying Mathematics with no prior knowledge of Physics whatsoever except for very simple equations. I would like to ask, due to my experience with Mathematics:

Is there a set of axioms to which it adheres? In Mathematics, we have given sets of axioms, and we build up equations from these sets.

How does one come up with seemingly simple equations that describe physical processes in nature? I mean, it's not like you can see an apple falling and intuitively come up with an equation for motion… Is there something to build up hypotheses from, and how are they proven, if the only way of verifying the truth is to do it experimentally? Is Physics rigorous?

Answer 1

No, physics is not rigorous in the sense of mathematics. There are standards of rigor for experiments, but that is a different kind of thing entirely. That is not to say that physicists just wave their hands in their arguments [only sometimes ;) ], but rather that it does not come even close to a formal axiomatized foundation like in mathematics.

Here's an excerpt from R.Feynman's lecture The Relation of Mathematics and Physics, available on youtube, which is also present in his book, Character of Physical Law (Ch. 2):

There are two kinds of ways of looking at mathematics, which for the purposes of this lecture, I will call the the Babylonian tradition and the Greek tradition. In Babylonian schools in mathematics, the student would learn something by doing a large number of examples until he caught on to the general rule. Also, a large amount of geometry was known... and some degree of argument was available to go from one thing to another. ... But Euclid discovered that there was a way in which all the theorems of geometry could be ordered from a set of axioms that were particularly simple... The Babylonian attitude... is that you have to know all the various theorems and many of the connections in between, but you never really realized that it could all come up from a bunch of axioms... [E]ven in mathematics, you can start in different places. ... The mathematical tradition of today is to start with some particular ones which are chosen by some kind of convention to be axioms and then to build up the structure from there. ... The method of starting from axioms is not efficient in obtaining the theorems. ... In physics we need the Babylonian methods, and not the Euclidean or Greek method.

The rest of the lecture is also interesting and I recommend it. He goes on (with an example of deriving conservation of angular momentum from Newton's law of gravitation and having it generalized):

We can deduce (often) from one part of physics, like the law of gravitation, a principle which turns out to be much more valid than the derivation. This doesn't happen in mathematics, that the theorems come out in places where they're not supposed to be.