Inner Vision, Outer Truth

Here is an old conundrum, many times resurrected: why do mathematics and physics fit together so surprisingly well? There is a famous article by Eugene Wigner, or at least an article with a famous title: “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in Natural Sciences.” After all, pure mathematics, as we all know, is created by fanatics sitting at their desks or scribbling on their blackboards. These wild men go where they please, led only by some notion of “beauty”, “elegance”, or “depth”, which nobody can really explain. Wigner wrote, “It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind's capacity to divine them.”…