We may as well cut out group theory. That is a subject that will never be of any use in physics.
James JeansPut three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.
James JeansThe essential fact is that all the pictures which science now draws of nature, and which alone seem capable of according with observational facts, are mathematical pictures.
James JeansKant, discussing the various modes of perception by which the human mind apprehends nature, concluded that it is specially prone to see nature through mathematical spectacles. Just as a man wearing blue spectacles would see only a blue world, so Kant thought that, with our mental bias, we tend to see only a mathematical world.
James JeansIn this model, the sun is a very tiny speck of dust indeed-a speck less than a three-thousandth of an inch in diameter ... Think of the sun as something less than a speck of dust in a vast city, of the earth as less than a millionth part of such a speck of dust, and we have perhaps as vivid a picture as the mind can really grasp of the relation of our home in space to the rest of the universe.
James Jeans