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Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Poincaré, Henri and Halsted, George Bruce
You have doubtless often been asked of what good is mathematics and whether these delicate constructions entirely mind-made are not artificial and born of our caprice.
Among those who put this question I should make a distinction; practical people ask of us only the means of money-making. These merit no reply; rather would it be proper to ask of them what is the good of accumulating so much wealth and whether, to get time to acquire it, we are to neglect art and science, which alone give us souls capable of enjoying it, 'and for life's sake to sacrifice all reasons for living.'
Besides, a science made solely in view of applications is impossible; truths are fecund only if bound together. If we devote ourselves solely to those truths whence we expect an immediate result, the intermediary links are wanting and there will no longer be a chain.
The men most disdainful of theory get from it, without suspecting it, their daily bread; deprived of this food, progress would quickly cease, and we should soon congeal into the immobility of old China.
But enough of uncompromising practicians! Besides these, there are those who are only interested in nature and who ask us if we can enable them to know it better.
To answer these, we have only to show them the two monuments already rough-hewn, Celestial Mechanics and Mathematical Physics.
They would doubtless concede that these structures are well worth the trouble they have cost us. But this is not enough. Mathematics has a triple aim. It must furnish an instrument for the study of nature. But that is not all: it has a philosophic aim and, I dare maintain, an esthetic aim. It must aid the philosopher to fathom the notions of number, of space, of time. And above all, its adepts find therein delights analogous to those given by painting and music. They admire the delicate harmony of numbers and forms; they marvel when a new discovery opens to them an unexpected perspective; and has not the joy they thus feel the esthetic character, even though the senses take no part therein? Only a privileged few are called to enjoy it fully, it is true, but is not this the case for all the noblest arts?
This is why I do not hesitate to say that mathematics deserves to be cultivated for its own sake, and the theories inapplicable to physics as well as the others. Even if the physical aim and the esthetic aim were not united, we ought not to sacrifice either.
But more: these two aims are inseparable and the best means of attaining one is to aim at the other, or at least never to lose sight of it. This is what I am about to try to demonstrate in setting forth the nature of the relations between the pure science and its applications.
The mathematician should not be for the physicist a mere purveyor of formulas; there should be between them a more intimate collaboration. Mathematical physics and pure analysis are not merely adjacent powers, maintaining good neighborly relations; they mutually interpenetrate and their spirit is the same. This will be better understood when I have shown what physics gets from mathematics and what mathematics, in return, borrows from physics.