The Philosophy of Science Part VI: Mathematics, Pythagoras and irrational numbers.

This video is part of a continuing series exploring the underlying philosophy that governs the modern scientific method. My videos develop the idea that science is built on the following foundations which I summarise using single words all beginning with the letter “C”. In the three videos we covered:

Coherence
Co-existence
Correspondence
Conservation
Compaction (Occam’s razor)

In the 4^th and 5^th video we then began to explore the important scientific tool of mathematics (“Calculation”) and in these videos we developed our number system and basic algebra as we begin to build up a tool kit to prove Einstein’s famous formula E=mc². This week we prove Pythagoras’ theorem which we shall make use of when we begin working with special relativity. We also go a little off-piste and prove that √2 is an irrational number.