MemeMachineGo!

On the occasion of a new book on the subject, It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science, the NY Times has this article about how scientists perceive the relationship between the beauty of their equations and their truth, the relation between mathematics and the real world.

Rare indeed is the scientist who has not at one point or other been seduced by the beauty of his own equations and dumbfounded by what the physicist Dr. Eugene Wigner of Princeton once called the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in describing the world.

While on the subject, I'll note that I've always found Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to be ultimately intellectually and spiritually bankrupt due substantially to the narrator's assertion that the one place he could not find 'Quality' was in pure mathematics, marking him in my book as either profoundly ignorant or spiritually dead. I find, though, that the people who liked the book never remember that assertion.

(Via Metafilter)