It is often said that the universe is written in the language of mathematics, that reality itself can be perfectly described through equations, models, and abstract structures. From Pythagoras to Galileo to Newton to Einstein, Physics has long claimed to uncover the “fundamental laws of nature” through mathematics. But what if this is not an intrinsic property of the universe, but rather a reflection of how the human mind perceives and processes reality?
Mathematics is a construct of the human intellect—a system of symbolic logic built within our cognitive architecture and maybe even partially prewired by evolution (is there any other way to explain how mathematicians like Fermat, Euler, Ramanujan, and others would first envision or intuit complex theorems and then, if at all, work out their proofs?). Mathematics arises from our need to describe patterns, quantify experience, and communicate abstractions. Similarly, our understanding of the universe—what we call “reality”—is itself a filtered product of human perception. We do not experience the universe directly; we experience sensations interpreted by our brains, mediated by our limited sensory systems and tools.
The harmony between mathematics and physical laws may not be a discovery of an external truth, but simply a resonance between two internal constructs: mathematics and perception. Physics, then, does not describe the universe as it is, but rather the universe as we perceive it to be, using the mathematical tools we have created along the mathematical intuition prewired in our brains by evolution to make sense of those perceptions.
Over time, as new technologies extend the boundaries of what we can perceive—from Galileo's telescope to particle accelerators—our perception of reality shifts. Paradigms change. What we once thought were immutable laws are revised or replaced. Galilean transformations gave way to Lorentz transformations, classical mechanics to quantum field theory. Each new lens on the universe demands new physics or the reinterpretation of old one.
Thus, the history of physics is not the revelation of a final, perfect model, but the evolution of increasingly refined approximations of human perception, expressed mathematically. Reality itself may be somehow immutable, but our access to it is definitely not. Our models are always evolving because perception is always evolving.
In this light, the universe does not speak mathematics, we do!
