"The pre-eminence of astronomy rests on the peculiarity that it can be treated mathematically; and the progress of physics, and most recently biology, has hinged equally on finding formulations of their laws that can be displayed as mathematical models." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Ascent of Man", 1973)
"The chief difficulty of modern theoretical physics resides not in the fact that it expresses itself almost exclusively in mathematical symbols, but in the psychological difficulty of supposing that complete nonsense can be seriously promulgated and transmitted by persons who have sufficient intelligence of some kind to perform operations in differential and integral calculus […]" (Celia Green, "The Decline and Fall of Science", 1976)
"There may be such a thing as habitual luck. People who are said to be lucky at cards probably have certain hidden talents for those games in which skill plays a role. It is like hidden parameters in physics, this ability that does not surface and that I like to call 'habitual luck'." (Stanislaw Ulam, "Adventures of a Mathematician", 1976)
"Mathematical physics represents the purest image that the view of nature may generate in the human mind; this image presents all the character of the product of art; it begets some unity, it is true and has the quality of sublimity; this image is to physical nature what music is to the thousand noises of which the air is full […]" (Théophile de Donder, 1977)
"'Catastrophe theory' denotes both a purely mathematical discipline describing certain singularities of smooth maps, as well as the concerted effort to apply these theorems to a wide variety of problems in fields ranging from linguistics and psychology to embryology, evolution, physics, and engineering." (Héctor J Sussmann & Raphael S Zahler, "Catastrophe Theory as Applied to the Social and Biological Sciences: A Critique" Synthese Vol. 37 (2), 1978)
"Physics defines itself as the science devoted to discovering, developing and refining those aspects of reality that are amenable to mathematical analysis." (John M Ziman, "Reliable Knowledge: An Exploration of the Grounds for Belief in Science", 1978)
"Unfortunately, when most people think of 'physics', they think of chalkboards covered with undecipherable symbols of an unknown mathematics. The fact is that physics is not mathematics. Physics, in essence, is simple wonder at the way things are and a divine (some call it compulsive) interest in how that is so. Mathematics is the tool of physics. Stripped of mathematics, physics becomes pure enchantment." (Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", 1979)
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