The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.
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The earliest published source found on google books that attributes this to Euclid is A Mathematical Journey by Stanley Gudder (1994), p. xv. However, many earlier works attribute it to Johannes Kepler, the earliest located being in the piece "The Mathematics of Elementary Chemistry" by Principal J. McIntosh of Fowler Union High School in California, which appeared in School Science and Mathematics, Volume VII (1907), p. 383. Neither this nor any other source located gives a source in Kepler's writings, however, and in an earlier source, the 1888 Notes and Queries, Vol V., it is attributed on p. 165 to Plato. It could possibly be a paraphrase of either or both of the following to comments in Kepler's 1618 book Harmonices Mundi (The Harmony of the World)': "Geometry is one and eternal shining in the mind of God" and "Since geometry is co-eternal with the divine mind before the birth of things, God himself served as his own model in creating the world".Euclid
The laws of classical mechanics represent a mathematical idealization and should not be assumed to correspond to the real laws of nature. ... We now have to realize that errors are inevitable (..) a discovery that makes strict determinism impossible.
Leon Brillouin
All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
This is not what I thought physics was about when I started out: I learned that the idea is to explain nature in terms of clearly understood mathematical laws; but perhaps comparisons are the best we can hope for.
Hans Christian von Baeyer
This idea is that laws which purport to be statements of what actually occurs are statistical in character as distinct from so-called dynamic laws that are abstract and mathematical, and disguised definitions. Recognition of the statistical nature of physical laws was first effected in the case of gases when it became evident that generalizations regarding the behavior of swarms of molecules were not descriptions or predictions of the behavior of any individual particle. A single molecule is not and cannot be a gas. It is consequently absurd to suppose that a scientific law is about the elementary constituents of a gas. It is a statement of what happens when a large number of such constituents interact with one another under certain conditions.
John Dewey
Euclid
Euler, Leonhard
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