The Unreasonable Accuracy of Moore's Law [Historical

Abstract

In 1960, three years before receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics, Hungarian-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician Eugene Wigner (1902?1995) published a paper, ?The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.? In it, he argued about the surprising precision with which mathematical equations can describe physical phenomena [1]. He considered Newton?s second law, which states that the gravitational force acting on a falling body is proportional to its mass and no other parameter of that body. Newton brought this law into relation with the motion of the moon, noting that the parabola of a thrown rock and the circle of the moon's path in the sky are particular cases of the same mathematical object, the ellipse, deducing the universal law of gravitation. Initially, this law was supported by a single and rough coincidence with an accuracy of a mere 4%, but subsequent observations proved that it held to an accuracy of 0.001%. Wigner also examined other laws, such as quantum mechanics that, when formulated in the form of matrix mechanics to calculate the lowest energy level of helium, matched experiments to a relative error of 10?7.