Vedic Hridaya Chakshu : Why is mathematics so effective in Exploring Nature

Abstract

Mathematics rightly viewed, wrote Russell in his 'Study of Mathematics', 'possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show." The physicist Eugene Wigner once remarked that [t]he miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of (Nature) physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.' Steven Weinberg is another physicist puzzled with it, put, "It is very strange that mathematicians are led by their sense of mathematical beauty to develop formal structures that physicists only later find useful, even where the mathematician had no such goal in mind." The question is , how does the mathematician, who is more like an artist than an explorer, while working in abstract, away from nature, arrive at the most appropriate descriptions of nature? Nearly 82 years ago, Eugene Wigner set the puzzle up in his famous paper to call it "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics". It is a puzzle well known to the scientists and philosophers, but caught very little attention in the philosophical literature, which may be due to the presuppositions in the paradigm shift from a formalist philosophy of mathematics, and the rise of anti-realist paradigm in the philosophy of Mathematics. Whatever it may be, but when we look at the issue from our Vedic perspective, we find that the Vedas and Brahmanas provide irrefutable foundations where there can be no place for this so-called puzzle. In this paper we present some of the key ideas from the Vedas and Shatpath Brahmana, which provide the very foundation, a misunderstanding, of which leads to such a puzzle.