Descartes' son

A Physics Nobel is awarded, in part, to a mathematician, the knighted Roger Penrose. The Nobel somewhat-famously has no award for Mathematics, but if the mathematics is very good and touches on physics, then - I suppose - an exception can be made. Even here the Nobel committee hedges by offering half the award to a couple of astronomers.

(Our President has been nominated also - for Peace. Thrice, in fact: the Gulf, the Balkans, and lately the Koreas. Each 2020 nominator was, perhaps, trolling the 2008 committee, more than saying anything about our President. That committee eminently deserves the troll. I don't think the Nobel should be giving Prizes to Presidents in sequential Administrations but I do hope that, when this President is denied the award, we hear at least a minority-report speech giving to him due credit. But back to our topic.)

Peter Woit approves Penrose' award. He further directs us to the new laureate's book, The Road to Reality. This, says Woit, is an original and deep vision of the unity of geometry and physics. This looks like... René Descartes.

Descartes is most famed for the epigram cogito ergo sum. Conservative moralists sometimes write against him; Berke Breathed mocked this tendency in a Sunday strip once. Hahn and Wiker, Conservative moralists, play Breathed's rôle and devote a whole chapter in Politicizing the Bible basically sneering at Cartesian ego(t)ism.

In Descartes' times, "science" was still natural-history. All Christians agreed that mathematics was objectively provable. Thomas Aquinas assumed that; only insisting that the natural world, by contrast, was still subject to miracle. (Note: Aquinas is here ahead of Richard Spencer and of the American Mathematical Association.) Descartes proposed that his sixteenth century had reached a point such that Plato and Pythagoras could be revived, at least as far as describing physics in terms of algebraic equations. He presented his Discourse on the Method as a muqaddima for his algebraic geometry.

As with Darwin: we can quibble with Descartes' assumptions and conclusions, and we can muse darkly on his motives. I'll just note that Descartes' successors get Nobel Prizes. Hahn and Wiker will probably not.