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Maths Becomes Biology's Magic Number (bbc.com)
In the middle of a discussion about the pros and cons of statins, Sir Rory Collins, the head of clinical trials at Oxford University, noted that If you want a career in medicine these days you're better off studying mathematics or computing than biology. A report on BBC adds: It is a nice one-liner, but I didn't think much more about it until a few days later, when I found myself sitting in a press conference to mark the launch of a new initiative on cancer. Rubbing shoulders on the panel with the director of the Institute of Cancer Research, Professor Paul Workman, was a scientist I didn't recognise, but it soon became clear this was exactly what Sir Rory had had in mind. Dr Andrea Sottoriva is an astrophysicist. He has spent much of his career searching for Neutrinos -- the elusive sub-atomic particles created by the fusion of elements in stars like our sun -- at the bottom of the ocean, and analysing the results of atom smashing experiments with the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Geneva. "My background is in computer science, particularly as it applies to particle physics," he told me when we met at the ICR's laboratories in Sutton. So why cancer? The answer can be summed up in two words: big data. What Dr Sottoriva brings to the fight against cancer is the expertise in mathematical modelling needed to mine the vast treasure trove of data the information revolution has brought to medicine. "The exciting thing is that we can apply all the new analytical techniques we've developed in physics to biology," he says. "So we have all these new quantitative technologies that allow us to process an enormous amount of data, and all of a sudden we can start to apply that to implement the paradigm of physics in biology."
Clobbering reality with statistics is what you do when you don't have a theory to work with.
It's kind of un-scientific, but it puts all that equipment to 'good use.'
Physicists have been doing this for a long time. See Max Delbruck and the phage group in the 40's and 50's
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This hasn't always been the case. Michael Faraday had no formal degree and used hardly any math and yet contributed a great deal. I just watched a lecture series by him recently (reccomended) and was impressed by how much he was able to demonstrate through nothing but rigorous qualitative experimentation. I kinda have this impression, which I know to be completely false, that everyone prior to the modern era were total idiots who ascribed all natural phenomena to humorous vapors and spirits and the mumbling of witch doctors. To be able to learn something about the physical world from someone who's been dead for 150 years is somewhat revelatory.
Of course, most all of what can be learned that way has been learned that way. So you're not completely off base to say that you can't do science without math if you're talking about contributing to the sum of human knowledge, but a person who learns a thing through rigorous experimentation and application of the scientific method is still doing science, even if what they discover is already known to the broader scientific community.
Would it make sense to have a mathematic? Would you put it on the same shelf as your economic?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."