Remark on a comment made

A while ago one of the contributors, with the appropriate pseudo-authority of an echo chamber, announced that mathematical voodoo is more relevant than normal descriptions and normal language. It was something to do with the wave/particle junk and the strain on language to make it appear that a moving object can be both and neither simultaneously but ultimately it is a high end academic welfare scam that worked for a number of decades but has since passed its sell by date.

What looks like a mathematical ascent really is an astronomical descent that has been going on for 3 centuries but the recent total dominance of mathematical voodoo has its roots about 40 years ago when theorists really started to lose the run of themselves -

“A Langrangian is not a physical thing;it is a mathematical thing – a
kind of differential equation to be exact.But physics and maths are so
closely connected these days that it is hard to separate the numbers
from the things they describe.In fact,a month after [Philip]
Morrison’s remarks,Nobel Prize winner Burton Richter of the Stanford
Linear Accelerator Center said something that eerily echoed it: �
Mathematics is a language that is used to describe nature� he said
“But the theorists are beginning to think it is nature.To them the
Langrangians are the reality � Discover Magazine ,1983


I am sure some contributors here will be relieved that I moved away from insights like the partitioning of direct/retrograde planetary observations and their translation into perspectives seen from a moving Earth but the mathematical dross is still present in obscuring genuine creative and productive astronomical research.