Dirac wrote his equation in 1928 and found it demanding a particle like the electron but positively charged; four years later the positron turned up in a cloud chamber. That pattern repeated often enough for Wigner in 1960 to name the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. Whether mathematics is discovered or invented, however, is a question no experiment can settle: Platonism, formalism, embodied mind and the mathematical universe are philosophical positions argued with reasons rather than data. Gödel and Turing showed that mathematics itself has limits too.
Dirac wrote his equation in 1928 and found it demanding a particle like the electron but positively charged; four years later the positron turned up in a cloud chamber. That pattern repeated often enough for Wigner in 1960 to name the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. Whether mathematics is discovered or invented, however, is a question no experiment can settle: Platonism, formalism, embodied mind and the mathematical universe are philosophical positions argued with reasons rather than data. Gödel and Turing showed that mathematics itself has limits too.
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