Complete Wigner's observation.
The 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics' names the fact that abstract mathematics, developed for its own logical beauty, turns out to ______.
Word bank: describe nature with astonishing precision · be useless outside pure mathematics · apply only to idealised systems that do not exist · be replaced eventually by experiment
Hints
- The phrase is an expression of surprise at a success, not of a complaint.
- Why should structures invented with no eye on the world fit the world so well?
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The 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics' names the fact that abstract mathematics, developed for its own logical beauty, turns out to describe nature with astonishing precision.
Mathematics built for its own sake — conic sections, matrices, non-Euclidean geometry — later turned out to be exactly what orbits, quantum states and gravity required. Why that should be so remains genuinely unexplained, which is what makes the effectiveness 'unreasonable'.
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