In 1960 Eugene Wigner wrote a famous essay entitled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” 1 After recounting several remarkable mathematical success stories, he concluded:
And of course that miracle did remain valid in future research. Indeed, perhaps the most startling success of the language of mathematics in the formulation of the laws of physics occurred about a decade after Wigner wrote his essay, with the emergence of non-abelian gauge theories of fundamental interactions. In those theories, the building blocks of matter emerge as nearly ideal embodiments of intricate, abstract symmetry principles.
Yet, despite its tension with Wigner’s thesis, I hold this truth to be self-evident: that all correct general principles must be reasonable. For the burden of reason is to clarify reality through the application of correct general principles. If a correct general principle appears unreasonable, that appearance is a fault we must repair—either by reasoning...
