[speedchess]

> One of my physics lecturers at university made the offhand observation that the distinction between physics and mathematics is a twentieth-century idea:

It's actually a 19th century idea. The discovery or acceptance of non-euclidean geometry in the 19th century untethered math from physics or physics from math.

> and it seems to be disappearing in the twenty-first.

It can't disappear because math is no longer tied to the physical world. Math is simply theorem generation regardless of whether the axioms and theorems apply to the physical world.

The math used in physics is only a tiny subset of possible math.