Nature and Mathematics VI (Mathematics and the Laws of Nature)

"The laws of nature 'discovered' by science are merely mathematical or mechanical models that describe how nature behaves, not why, nor what nature 'actually' is. Science strives to find representations that accurately describe nature, not absolute truths. This fact distinguishes science from religion." (George Ogden Abell)

 "Natural Philosophy consists in discovering the frame and operations of Nature, and reducing them, as far as may be, to general Rules or Laws - establishing these rules by observations and experiments, and thence deducing the causes and effects of things.” (Isaac Newton)

"The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them."(Albert Einstein, “Principles of Research”, 1918)

"The simplicities of natural laws arise through the complexities of the language we use for their expression.” (Eugene Wigner)

“It is impossible to transcend the laws of nature. You can only determine that your understanding of nature has changed." (Nick Powers)

“The secret of nature is symmetry. When searching for new and more fundamental laws of nature, we should search for new symmetries.” (David Gross)

“The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics […]” (Galileo Galilei)

“We know many laws of nature and we hope and expect to discover more. Nobody can foresee the next such law that will be discovered. Nevertheless, there is a structure in laws of nature which we call the laws of invariance. This structure is so far-reaching in some cases that laws of nature were guessed on the basis of the postulate that they fit into the invariance structure.” (Eugene P Wigner)