Let me elaborate, how likely is that there’s an animal on earth that’s smarter than us? By smarter, I understand intelligence is a nuanced topic unique to different animals, so for the sake of argument, let’s talk about, mathematics, critical thinking about where and how to apply those mathematical concepts, and creativity in any form.
“intelligence is a nuanced topic” Understatement champion. Applying your examples “in any form” still doesn’t really work since those examples are built on communicating the steps as well as the result. If an animal can intuit precision without showing the work, do we still give credit for intelligence? Jumping spiders, for example, have an extremely developed intuition for parabolic trajectories, but I’d bet real money there’s no neural structure in their brains that looks like y^2 = 4ax.
And yet every professional physicist will tell you that physics IS math, and that if you don’t understand the math, you can’t understand physics, and shouldn’t try.
As a physicist, physics is not math. Math is a tool you can use to do physics, but you can absolutely do physics without it. In fact, qualitative physics is the best kind.
Physics is a mathematical model with the most proven utility to humans.
If you have a model more applicable to a situation, youre free to use it, but its pretty unlikely to be as broadly applicable as modern mathematical physics (A thousand times so when considering computers).
But yeah the study of physics is 100% math (And its not 100% a perfect model of reality! Thats why we study it).
Yeah I did expect my language wasn’t precise enough, so to be more clear, animal that can excel at maths or creativity in a similar way humans do.