"Nature always uses the simplest means to accomplish its effects." (Pierre L Maupertuis, "Accord between different laws of Nature that seemed incompatible", Mémoires de l'académie royale des sciences, 1744)
"The supreme Being is everywhere; but He is not equally visible everywhere. Let us seek Him in the simplest things, in the most fundamental laws of Nature, in the universal rules by which movement is conserved, distributed or destroyed; and let us not seek Him in phenomena that are merely complex consequences of these laws."
"Especially when we investigate the general laws of Nature, induction has very great power; & there is scarcely any other method beside it for the discovery of these laws. By its assistance, even the ancient philosophers attributed to all bodies extension, figurability, mobility, & impenetrability; & to these properties, by the use of the same method of reasoning, most of the later philosophers add inertia & universal gravitation. Now, induction should take account of every single case that can possibly happen, before it can have the force of demonstration; such induction as this has no place in establishing the laws of Nature. But use is made of an induction of a less rigorous type ; in order that this kind of induction may be employed, it must be of such a nature that in all those cases particularly, which can be examined in a manner that is bound to lead to a definite conclusion as to whether or no the law in question is followed, in all of them the same result is arrived at; & that these cases are not merely a few. Moreover, in the other cases, if those which at first sight appeared to be contradictory, on further & more accurate investigation, can all of them be made to agree with the law; although, whether they can be made to agree in this way better than in any Other whatever, it is impossible to know directly anyhow. If such conditions obtain, then it must be considered that the induction is adapted to establishing the law." (Roger J Boscovich, "De Lege Continuitatis" ["On the law of continuity"], 1754)
"Systems in physical science […] are no more than appropriate instruments to aid the weakness of our organs: they are, properly speaking, approximate methods which put us on the path to the solution of the problem; these are the hypotheses which, successively modified, corrected, and changed in proportion as they are found false, should lead us infallibly one day, by a process of exclusion, to the knowledge of the true laws of nature." (Antoine L Lavoisier, "Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences", 1777)
"[…] we are far from having exhausted all the applications of analysis to geometry, and instead of believing that we have approached the end where these sciences must stop because they have reached the limit of the forces of the human spirit, we ought to avow rather we are only at the first steps of an immense career. These new [practical] applications, independently of the utility which they may have in themselves, are necessary to the progress of analysis in general; they give birth to questions which one would not think to propose; they demand that one create new methods. Technical processes are the children of need; one can say the same for the methods of the most abstract sciences. But we owe the latter to the needs of a more noble kind, the need to discover the new truths or to know better the laws of nature." (Nicolas de Condorcet, 1781)
"The laws of nature are the rules according to which the effects are produced; but there must be a cause which operates according to these rules." (Thomas Reid, "Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man", 1785)
"The end of natural philosophy is to increase either the knowledge or power of man, and enable him to understand the ways and procedure of nature. By discovering the laws of nature, he acquires knowledge, and obtains power; for when these laws are discovered, he can use them as rules of practice, to equal, subdue, or even excel nature by art." (George Adams, "Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy" Vol. 2, 1794)
"[…] we must not measure the simplicity of the laws of nature by our facility of conception; but when those which appear to us the most simple, accord perfectly with observations of the phenomena, we are justified in supposing them rigorously exact." (Pierre-Simon Laplace, "The System of the World", 1809)
"In all speculations on the origin, or agents that have produced the changes on this globe, it is probable that we ought to keep within the boundaries of the probable effects resulting from the regular operations of the great laws of nature which our experience and observation have brought within the sphere of our knowledge. When we overleap those limits, and suppose a total change in nature's laws, we embark on the sea of uncertainty, where one conjecture is perhaps as probable as another; for none of them can have any support, or derive any authority from the practical facts wherewith our experience has brought us acquainted." (William Maclure, "Observations on the Geology of the United States of America", 1817)
"There are no rules or models; that is, there are no rules except general laws of nature which hover over art and special laws which apply to specific subjects." (Victor M Hugo, "Cromwell", 1827)
"Every theorem in geometry is a law of external nature, and might have been ascertained by generalizing from observation and experiment, which in this case resolve themselves into comparisons and measurements. But it was found practicable, and being practicable was desirable, to deduce these truths by ratiocination from a small number of general laws of nature, the certainty and universality of which was obvious to the most careless observer, and which compose the first principles and ultimate premises of the science." (John S Mill, "A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive", 1843)
"The Laws of Nature are merely truths or generalized facts, in regard to matter, derived by induction from experience, observation, arid experiment. The laws of mathematical science are generalized truths derived from the consideration of Number and Space." (Charles Davies, "The Logic and Utility of Mathematics", 1850)
"If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view, as to the traveler, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness." (Henry D Thoreau, "Walden; or, Life in the Woods", 1854)
"This science, Geometry, is one of indispensable use and constant reference, for every student of the laws of nature; for the relations of space and number are the alphabet in which those laws are written. But besides the interest and importance of this kind which geometry possesses, it has a great and peculiar value for all who wish to understand the foundations of human knowledge, and the methods by which it is acquired. For the student of geometry acquires, with a degree of insight and clearness which the unmathematical reader can but feebly imagine, a conviction that there are necessary truths, many of them of a very complex and striking character; and that a few of the most simple and self-evident truths which it is possible for the mind of man to apprehend, may, by systematic deduction, lead to the most remote and unexpected results." (William Whewell, "The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences", 1858)
"A law of nature, however, is not a mere logical conception that we have adopted as a kind of memoria technical to enable us to more readily remember facts. We of the present day have already sufficient insight to know that the laws of nature are not things which we can evolve by any speculative method. On the contrary, we have to discover them in the facts; we have to test them by repeated observation or experiment, in constantly new cases, under ever-varying circumstances; and in proportion only as they hold good under a constantly increasing change of conditions, in a constantly increasing number of cases with greater delicacy in the means of observation, does our confidence in their trustworthiness rise." (Hermann von Helmholtz, "Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects", 1873)
"Our books of science, as they improve in accuracy, are in danger of losing the freshness and vigor and readiness to appreciate the real laws of Nature, which is a marked merit in the ofttimes false theories of the ancients." (Henry D Thoreau, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1873)
"The history of thought should warn us against concluding that because the scientific theory of the world is the best that has yet been formulated, it is necessarily complete and final. We must remember that at bottom the generalizations of science or, in common parlance, the laws of nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of the world and the universe." (Sir James G Frazer, "The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion", 1890)
"The strongest use of the symbol is to be found in its magical power of doubling the actual universe, and placing by its side an ideal universe, its exact counterpart, with which it can be compared and contrasted, and, by means of curiously connecting fibres, form with it an organic whole, from which modern analysis has developed her surpassing geometry." (Benjamin Peirce, "On the Uses and Transformations of Linear Algebra", 1875)
"The history of thought should warn us against concluding that because the scientific theory of the world is the best that has yet been formulated, it is necessarily complete and final. We must remember that at bottom the generalizations of science or, in common parlance, the laws of nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of the world and the universe." (Sir James G Frazer, "The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion", 1890)
"Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws." (Thomas H Huxley, "Science and Education", 1891)
"The laws of nature are drawn from experience, but to express them one needs a special language: for, ordinary language is too poor and too vague to express relations so subtle, so rich, so precise. Here then is the first reason why a physicist cannot dispense with mathematics: it provides him with the one language he can speak […]. Who has taught us the true analogies, the profound analogies which the eyes do not see, but which reason can divine? It is the mathematical mind, which scorns content and clings to pure form." (Henri Poincaré, "The Value of Science", 1905)
"Pythagoras says that number is the origin of all things, and certainly the law of number is the key that unlocks the secrets of the universe. But the law of number possesses an immanent order, which is at first sight mystifying, but on a more intimate acquaintance we easily understand it to be intrinsically necessary; and this law of number explains the wondrous consistency of the laws of nature. (Paul Carus, "Reflections on Magic Squares", Monist Vol. 16, 1906)
"An exceedingly small cause which escapes our notice determines a considerable effect that we cannot fail to see, and then we say the effect is due to chance. If we knew exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the situation of that same universe at a succeeding moment. But even if it were the case that the natural laws had no longer any secret for us, we could still only know the initial situation 'approximately'. If that enabled us to predict the succeeding situation with 'the same approximation', that is all we require, and we should say that the phenomenon had been predicted, that it is governed by laws. But it is not always so; it may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter. Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomenon. (Jules H Poincaré, "Science and Method", 1908)
"The regularities in the phenomena which physical science endeavors to uncover are called the laws of nature. The name is actually very appropriate. Just as legal laws regulate actions and behavior under certain conditions but do not try to regulate all action and behavior, the laws of physics also determine the behavior of its objects of interest only under certain well-defined conditions but leave much freedom otherwise." (Eugene P Wigner, "Events, Laws of Nature, and Invariance principles", [Nobel lecture] 1914)
"But it is just this characteristic of simplicity in the laws of nature hitherto discovered which it would be fallacious to generalize, for it is obvious that simplicity has been a part cause of their discovery, and can, therefore, give no ground for the supposition that other undiscovered laws are equally simple." (Bertrand Russell, "'On the Scientific Method in Philosophy", 1918)
"The laws of nature cannot be intelligently applied until they are understood, and in order to understand them, many experiments bearing upon the ultimate nature of things must be made, in order that all may be combined in a far-reaching generalization impossible without the detailed knowledge upon which it rests." (Theodore W Richards, "The Problem of Radioactive Lead", 1918)
"'Causation' has been popularly used to express the condition of association, when applied to natural phenomena. There is no philosophical basis for giving it a wider meaning than partial or absolute association. In no case has it been proved that there is an inherent necessity in the laws of nature. Causation is correlation. [...] perfect correlation, when based upon sufficient experience, is causation in the scientific sense." (Henry E. Niles, "Correlation, Causation and Wright's Theory of 'Path Coefficients'", Genetics, 1922)
"Architecture is the first manifestation of man creating his own universe, creating it in the image of nature, submitting to the laws of nature, the laws which govern our own nature, our universe. The laws of gravity, of statics and of dynamics, impose themselves by a reductio ad absurdum: everything must hold together or it will collapse." (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret [Le Corbusier], "Towards a New Architecture", 1923)
"For establishing the laws of nature one resorts (not deliberately but involuntarily) to the simplest formulas that seem to describe the phenomena with reasonable accuracy. […] Even those laws of nature that are the most general and important for the world view have always been proved experimentally only in a confined ambit and with limited accuracy. […] The exact formulation of the laws of nature by simple formulas is based on the desire to master external phenomena with the simplest tools possible." (Felix Klein, "Elementary Mathematics from a Higher Standpoint" Vol III: "Precision Mathematics and Approximation Mathematics", 1928)
"It goes without saying that the laws of nature are in themselves independent of the properties of the instruments with which they are measured. Therefore in every observation of natural phenomena we must remember the principle that the reliability of the measuring apparatus must always play an important role." (Max Planck,"Where is Science Going?", 1932)
"Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. One seeks the most general ideas of operation which will bring together in simple, logical and unified form the largest possible circle of formal relationships. In this effort toward logical beauty spiritual formulas are discovered necessary for the deeper penetration into the laws of nature." (Albert Einstein, [Obituary for Emmy Noether], 1935)
"The researcher worker, in his efforts to express the fundamental laws of Nature in mathematical form, should strive mainly for mathematical beauty. He should still take simplicity into consideration in a subordinate way to beauty. […] It often happens that the requirements of simplicity and beauty are the same, but where they clash the latter must take precedence." (Paul A M Dirac, "The Relation Between Mathematics and Physics", Proceedings of the Royal Society , Volume LIX, 1939)
"The fundamental difference between engineering with and without statistics boils down to the difference between the use of a scientific method based upon the concept of laws of nature that do not allow for chance or uncertainty and a scientific method based upon the concepts of laws of probability as an attribute of nature." (Walter A Shewhart, 1940)
"The laws of nature may be operative up to a certain limit, beyond which they turn against themselves to give birth to the absurd." (Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus", 1942)
"The responsibility for the creation of new scientific knowledge - and for most of its application - rests on that small body of men and women who understand the fundamental laws of nature and are skilled in the techniques of scientific research. We shall have rapid or slow advance on any scientific frontier depending on the number of highly qualified and trained scientists exploring it."(Vannevar Bush, "Science: The Endless Frontier", 1945)
"In classical physics, most of the fundamental laws of nature were concerned either with the stability of certain configurations of bodies, e.g. the solar system, or else with the conservation of certain properties of matter, e.g. mass, energy, angular momentum or spin. The outstanding exception was the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics, discovered by Clausius in 1850. This law, as usually stated, refers to an abstract concept called entropy, which for any enclosed or thermally isolated system tends to increase continually with lapse of time. In practice, the most familiar example of this law occurs when two bodies are in contact: in general, heat tends to flow from the hotter body to the cooler. Thus, while the First Law of Thermodynamics, viz. the conservation of energy, is concerned only with time as mere duration, the Second Law involves the idea of trend." (Gerald J Whitrow, "The Structure of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology", 1949)
"We have assumed that the laws of nature must be capable of expression in a form which is invariant for all possible transformations of the space-time co-ordinates." (Gerald J Whitrow, "The Structure of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology", 1949)
"The world is not made up of empirical facts with the addition of the laws of nature: what we call the laws of nature are conceptual devices by which we organize our empirical knowledge and predict the future." (Richard B Braithwaite, "Scientific Explanation", 1953)
"The enormous usefulness of mathematics in natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious, and there is no rational explanation for it. It is not at all natural that ‘laws of nature’ exist, much less that man is able to discover them. The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve." (Eugene P Wigner, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," 1960)
"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, "The Role of Invariance Principles in Natural Philosophy", 1963)
"It is now natural for us to try to derive the laws of nature and to test their validity by means of the laws of invariance, rather than to derive the laws of invariance from what we believe to be the laws of nature." (Eugene P Wigner, "Symmetries and Reflections", 1967)
"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 O Abell, "Exploration of the Universe", 1969)
"[...] it seems self-evident that mathematics is not likely to be much help in discovering laws of nature. If a mathematician wants to make a contribution on this (and I admit it is the highest) level, he will have to master so much experimental material and train himself to think in a way so different from the one he has been accustomed to that he will, in effect, cease to be a mathematician." (Mark Kac, "On Applying Mathematics: Reflections and Examples", Quarterly of Applied Mathematics, 1972)
"Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, or mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention."
"It was mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances." (Hannah Arendt, "The Life of the Mind", 1977)
"The ideas that are basic to [my work] often bear witness to my amazement and wonder at the laws of nature which operate in the world around us. He who wonders discovers that this is in itself a wonder. By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analyzing the observations that I had made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics." (Maurits C Escher, "The Graphic Work", 1978)
"Our form of life depends, in delicate and subtle ways, on several apparent ‘coincidences’ in the fundamental laws of nature which make the Universe tick. Without those coincidences, we would not be here to puzzle over the problem of their existence […] What does this mean? One possibility is that the Universe we know is a highly improbable accident, ‘just one of those things’." (John R Gribbin, "Genesis: The Origins of Man and the Universe", 1981)
"Scientific theories must tell us both what is true in nature, and how we are to explain it. I shall argue that these are entirely different functions and should be kept distinct. […] Scientific theories are thought to explain by dint of the descriptions they give of reality. […] The covering-law model supposes that all we need to know are the laws of nature - and a little logic, perhaps a little probability theory - and then we know which factors can explain which others." (Nancy Cartwright, "How the Laws of Physics Lie", 1983)
"Human beings are very conservative in some ways and virtually never change numerical conventions once they grow used to them. They even come to mistake them for laws of nature." (Isaac Asimov, "Foundation and Earth", 1986)
"Where chaos begins, classical science stops. For as long as the world has had physicists inquiring into the laws of nature, it has suffered a special ignorance about disorder in the atmosphere, in the fluctuations of the wildlife populations, in the oscillations of the heart and the brain. The irregular side of nature, the discontinuous and erratic side these have been puzzles to science, or worse, monstrosities." (James Gleick, "Chaos", 1987)
"The principle of maximum diversity operates both at the physical and at the mental level. It says that the laws of nature and the initial conditions are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Always when things are dull, something new turns up to challenge us and to stop us from settling into a rut. Examples of things which make life difficult are all around us: comet impacts, ice ages, weapons, plagues, nuclear fission, computers, sex, sin and death. Not all challenges can be overcome, and so we have tragedy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth." (Freeman J Dyson, "Infinite in All Directions", 1988)
"In practice, the intelligibility of the world amounts to the fact that we find it to be algorithmically compressible. We can replace sequences of facts and observational data by abbreviated statements which contain the same information content. These abbreviations we often call 'laws of Nature.' If the world were not algorithmically compressible, then there would exist no simple laws of nature. Instead of using the law of gravitation to compute the orbits of the planets at whatever time in history we want to know them, we would have to keep precise records of the positions of the planets at all past times; yet this would still not help us one iota in predicting where they would be at any time in the future. This world is potentially and actually intelligible because at some level it is extensively algorithmically compressible. At root, this is why mathematics can work as a description of the physical world. It is the most expedient language that we have found in which to express those algorithmic compressions." (John D Barrow, "New Theories of Everything", 1991)
"Somehow the breathless world that we witness seems far removed from the timeless laws of Nature which govern the elementary particles and forces of Nature. The reason is clear. We do not observe the laws of Nature: we observe their outcomes. Since these laws find their most efficient representation as mathematical equations, we might say that we see only the solutions of those equations not the equations themselves. This is the secret which reconciles the complexity observed in Nature with the advertised simplicity of her laws." (John D Barrow, "New Theories of Everything", 1991)
"How surprising it is that the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the universe should allow for the existence of beings who could observe it. Life as we know it would be impossible if any one of several physical quantities had slightly different values." (Steven Weinberg, Life in the Quantum Universe", Scientific American, 1995)
"It suggests to me that consciousness and our ability to do mathematics are no mere accident, no trivial detail, no insignificant by-product of evolution that is piggy-backing on some other mundane property. It points to what I like to call the cosmic connection, the existence of a really deep relationship between minds that can do mathematics and the underlying laws of nature that produce them. We have a closed system of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can encode [...] the very laws of physics that gave rise to it." (Paul Davies, "Are We Alone?: Philosophical Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life", 1995)
"Riemann concluded that electricity, magnetism, and gravity are caused by the crumpling of our three-dimensional universe in the unseen fourth dimension. Thus a 'force' has no independent life of its own; it is only the apparent effect caused by the distortion of geometry. By introducing the fourth spatial dimension, Riemann accidentally stumbled on what would become one of the dominant themes in modern theoretical physics, that the laws of nature appear simple when expressed in higher-dimensional space. He then set about developing a mathematical language in which this idea could be expressed." (Michio Kaku, "Hyperspace", 1995)
"The problems associated with the initial singularity of the universe bring us to what is called the theory of everything. It is an all-encompassing theory that would completely explain me origin of the universe and everything in it. It would bring together general relativity and quantum mechanics, and explain everything there is to know about the elementary particles of the universe, and the four basic forces of nature (gravitational, electromagnetic, weak, and strong nuclear forces). Furthermore, it would explain the basic laws of nature and the fundamental constants of nature such as the speed of light and Planck's constant." (Barry R Parker, "Chaos in the Cosmos: The stunning complexity of the universe", 1996)
"Knowledge is encoded in models. Models are synthetic sets of rules, pictures, and algorithms providing us with useful representations of the world of our perceptions and of their patterns. As argued by philosophers and shown by scientists, we do not have access to 'reality', only to some of its manifestations, whose regularities are used to determine rules, which when widely applicable become 'laws of nature'. These laws are constantly tested in the scientific march, and they evolve, develop and transmute as the frontier of knowledge recedes further away." (Burton G Malkiel, "A Random Walk Down Wall Street", 1999)
"Chaos theory reconciles our intuitive sense of free will with the deterministic laws of nature. However, it has an even deeper philosophical ramification. Not only do we have freedom to control our actions, but also the sensitivity to initial conditions implies that even our smallest act can drastically alter the course of history, for better or for worse. Like the butterfly flapping its wings, the results of our behavior are amplified with each day that passes, eventually producing a completely different world than would have existed in our absence!" (Julien C Sprott, "Strange Attractors: Creating Patterns in Chaos", 2000)
"We have come, in our time, to systematize our understanding of the rules of nature. We say that these rules are the laws of physics. The language of the laws of nature is mathematics. We acknowledge that our understanding of the laws is still incomplete, yet we know how to proceed to enlarge our understanding by means of the 'scientific method' - a logical process of observation and reason that distills the empirically true statements we can make about nature." (Leon M Lederman & Christopher T Hill, "Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe", 2004)
"The reality is that without mathematics, modern-day cosmologists could not have progressed even one step in attempting to understand the laws of nature. Mathematics provides the solid scaffolding that holds together any theory of the universe. […] Mathematics appears to be almost too effective in describing and explaining not only the cosmos at large, but even some of the most chaotic of human enterprises." (Mario Livio, "Is God a Mathematician?", 2011)
"Symmetries are transformations that keep certain parameters (properties, equations, and so on) invariant, that is, the parameters they refer to are conserved under these transformations. It is to be expected, therefore, that the identification of conserved quantities is inseparable from the identification of fundamental symmetries in the laws of nature. Symmetries single out 'privileged' operations, conservation laws single out 'privileged' quantities or properties that correspond to these operations. Yet the specific connections between a particular symmetry and the invariance it entails are far from obvious. For instance, the isotropy of space (the indistinguishability of its directions) is intuitive enough, but the conservation of angular momentum based on that symmetry, and indeed, the concept of angular momentum, are far less intuitive." (Yemima Ben-Menahem, "Causation in Science", 2018)
"It is impossible to transcend the laws of nature. You can only determine that your understanding of nature has changed." (Nick Powers)
"Modern man lacks a unified conception of the world. He lives in a dual world: in his environment, which is naturally given to him, and, at the same time, in the world which since the beginning of the modern era has been created for him by sciences founded upon the principle that the laws of nature are, in essence, mathematical. The non-unity which has thus come to penetrate our entire life is the true source of the spiritual crisis we are going through today." (Jan Patočka)
"Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature, and in such things as these, experiment is the best test of such consistency." (Michael Faraday)
"The highest triumph of the human mind, the true knowledge of the most general laws of nature, ought not to remain the private possession of a privileged class of learned men, but ought to become the common property of all mankind." (Ernst Häckel)
"The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God." (Euclid)
"The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics […]" (Galileo Galilei)
"The secret of nature is symmetry. When searching for new and more fundamental laws of nature, we should search for new symmetries." (David Gross)
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