The range of the sun’s influence is pretty darn impressive, but I shouldn’t be too shocked since it has 99.98% of the solar system’s mass. I wouldn’t be surprised if those solar winds act like a as an airbag of sorts preventing more harmful cosmic rays from completely affecting us.
It does sound like the forces (and the directions of those forces) would be more chaotic out there than the relatively ordered forces (hey, everyone, it radiates outward!) within the solar system itself. A random star in a random direction belches and suddenly the particle stream you’re in changes direction on a dime. It’d be like trying to sail a ship with the wind changing constantly.
Usually when people say math is the language of the universe, they mean that you can’t really understand science without using math. Since he also says this, I’m not sure what his point is. That math has limitations? That would actually be a better example to use, since it might come as a surprise to a lot of people. There are so many real misconceptions and not just student complaints: that there’s a special math gene that lets some people read and understand a math book in no time (actually it may take several days or more to really understand just one page of a high level math book), that doing math is as orderly as a textbook’s axiom-theorem-proof presentation, instead of that being the highly polished version that masks a whole lot of fumbling around and dead ends, etc. (“no self-respecting architect leaves the scaffolding in place after completing the building”-Gauss)
But maybe I’m nitpicking. He also mentions left/right and Feynman, so this may be of interest (he gives the lecture and section too, so the video is easy to find). I actually haven’t watched it yet, but I vaguely remember reading about it before.
