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.
--
As quoted in Lichtenberg : A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions (1959) by Joseph Peter Stern, p. 84Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
» Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - all quotes »
It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it. You may wonder: Why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge seems to show that nature is so constructed. We simply have to accept it. One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.
Paul Dirac
At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition, and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success. No obstacle has been so constant, or so difficult to overcome, as uncertainty and confusion touching the nature of true liberty. If hostile interests have wrought much injury, false ideas have wrought still more; and its advance is recorded in the increase of knowledge, as much as in the improvement of laws.
John (Lord Acton) Acton
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
The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.
Johannes Kepler
The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.
Euclid
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph
Lichtenstein, Roy
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