Equations can be nonsensical, but it’s harder to write a nonsense equation than a nonsense sentence (like the old joke: it’s easy to lie with statistics, but it’s easier to lie without them). In a way this was the unpleasant surprise of Godel’s incompleteness theorem; before that we’d hoped that every well-formed proposition was true or false and could be proven to be so.
Equations can be nonsensical, but it’s harder to write a nonsense equation than a nonsense sentence (like the old joke: it’s easy to lie with statistics, but it’s easier to lie without them). In a way this was the unpleasant surprise of Godel’s incompleteness theorem; before that we’d hoped that every well-formed proposition was true or false and could be proven to be so.