The effectiveness of mathematics in physics is reasonable because it is relative. We should reject the view, predominant in the history of modern physics, that mathematics offers a shortcut to eternal truth, and serves as the oracle of nature and the prophet of science. We can better understand mathematics as an exploration of a simulacrum of the world from which time and particularity have been sucked out. The radical selectivity of mathematical reasoning helps explain its power, its limits, and its dangers in physics. Mathematics is good at some things, and bad at others, especially at those that are historical. That limitation matters if the most important fact about the universe is that it is what it is as a result of its history. Mathematics cannot replace physical intuition or empirical discovery. In return for the immense service that it renders, it offers science a poisoned chalice: the idea of immutable laws of nature.
roberto mangabeira unger