Nick: I thought you might like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences
The References section at the end of the article are Wigner's and
Hamming's papers. Lovely title, I think -- sorta poetic.
I'm completely of Tegmark's ilk:
A different response, advocated by Physicist Max Tegmark (2007), is
that physics is so successfully described by mathematics because the
physical world is completely mathematical, isomorphic to a
mathematical structure, and that we are simply uncovering this bit by
bit. In this interpretation, the various approximations that
constitute our current physics theories are successful because simple
mathematical structures can provide good approximations of certain
aspects of more complex mathematical structures. In other words, our
successful theories are not mathematics approximating physics, but
mathematics approximating mathematics.
-- Owen
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