Cosmic Religionthat nature appears to obey mathematical laws. It seems like a
miracle. Wigner writes:
It is... a miracle that in spite of the baffl ing complexity of the
world, certain regularities in the events could be discovered...
It is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by
Darwin’s process of natural selection, to the perfection which
it seems to possess.It’s this notion of perfection that precipitates our second option
for the meaning of physics. It can be called Platonic. Roger
Penrose is a physicist who has worked out this position quite
explicitly. He is quite clear that the physical laws of nature
are mathematical, and that the laws seem to be accurate to a
quite extraordinary degree. They also clearly existed before any
human being had a mathematical thought; indeed, they existed
before there were human beings. Moreover, as Gödel has dem-
onstrated in his incompleteness theorem, there are axioms
within any sophisticated system of mathematics that cannot be
proven: they are true and that truth value has to be intuited.
Mathematics provides a very remarkable model of the physical
world and it’s hard to resist the conclusion that it’s written into
the world in some way.
Now, it is entirely possible that we may never grasp why
mathematics is so effective, and what the origins of its perfec-
tions might be. But we can say something about its effective-
ness, namely that it is routinely described by qualities like
‘order’ and ‘beauty’ and ‘wisdom’. The notion that mathematics
is ordered and beautiful is perhaps relatively familiar. So let me
pick up on the idea it is wise.
Consider the case of Einstein who found that the equations
of General Relativity implied things about the universe that he
refused to believe, like its expansion. He added a ‘cosmological
constant’ to the equations to cancel the effect. Later, though,
he had to accept expansion when it was empirically verifi ed by
Hubble. This famously led Einstein to calling the cosmological