Teaching physics to someone who doesn't know mathematics, according to the Nobel Prize winner Richard P. Feynman, is like explaining music to someone who is deaf.
Unlike Feynman, I have forgotten most of what I'd learnt about the laws of thermodynamics, SUVAT equations, or African drums. Well, I don't really know whether I've ever understood any one of them at all.
We all know that physicists are one of the cleverest humans. Think about Feynman who gathered with physicists from other universities in the early seventies. Somehow they got the idea that the physicists needed more culture. To bring some culture to their conversations and lectures, Feynman thought about Mayan mathematics. He deciphered the bars and dots after getting a copy of the oldest Maya books, the Dresden Codex.
Feynman figured out the bars and dots always carried at twenty the first time, then at eighteen the second time (making cycles of 360). He noticed certain numbers appear more often: the number 584 was particularly prominent. This 584 was divided into periods of 236, 90, 250, and 8. It didn't take him long to find that 583.92 days is the period of Venus as it appears from the earth. Then the 236, 90, 250, 8 became apparent to Feynman: it must be the phases that Venus goes through. Out of the table that had periods of 11,959 days, he further worked out the meaning of the funny number: the number to predict lunar eclipses.
Geez.
