It is indeed a surprising and fortunate fact that nature can be expressed by relatively low-order mathematical functions.
It would not become physical science to see in its self created, changeable, economical tools, molecules and atoms, realities behind phenomena... The atom must remain a tool for representing phenomena.
The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models. They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.
Simplicity and beauty are the signs not of truth but of a well-constructed approximate model of a limited domain of phenomena.
All models are approximations. Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. However, the approximate nature of the model must always be borne in mind.
In our work, we are always between Scylla and Charybdis; we may fail to abstract enough, and miss important physics, or we may abstract too much and end up with fictitious objects in our models turning into real monsters that devour us.
Science is all metaphor.
The electron is a theory we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real.
My wish is to construct a system of sociology on the model of celestial mechanics, physics, and chemistry.
