We all continue to feel a frustration because of our inability to foresee the soul's ultimate fate. Although we do not speak about it, we all know that the objectives of our science are, from a general point of view, much more modest than the objectives of, say, the Greek sciences were; that our science is more successful in giving us power than in giving us knowledge of truly human interest. [E. P. Wigner, 1972, The place of consciousness in modern physics, in Consciousness and Reality, eds. C. Muses and A. M. Young, New York, Outerbridge and Lizard, pp. 132–141].

In this book we have explored many methods of mathematics as used in the physical sciences. Mathematics plays a central role in the physical sciences because it is the only language we have for expressing quantitative relations in the world around us. In fact, mathematics not only allows us to express phenomena in a quantitative way, it also has a remarkable predictive power in the sense that it allows us to deduce the consequences of natural laws in terms of measurable quantities. In fact, we do not quite understand why mathematics gives such an accurate description of the world around us [120].

It is truly stunning how accurate some of the predictions in (mathematical) physics have been. The orbits of the planetary bodies can now be computed with an extreme accuracy. Morrison and Stephenson [72] compared the path of a solar eclipse at 181 BC with historic descriptions made in a city in eastern China that was located in the path of the solar eclipse.