Yeah it's silly, I don't mean it in any mean spirited way.

> Wigner's first example is the law of gravitation formulated by Isaac Newton. Originally used to model freely falling bodies on the surface of the Earth, this law was extended based on what Wigner terms "very scanty observations"[3] to describe the motion of the planets, where it "has proved accurate beyond all reasonable expectations."

So despite 'very scant observations' they yielded a very effective model. Okay fine. But deciding they should be 'unreasonably' so is just a pithy turn of phrase.

That mathematics can model science so well, is reductive and reduces to the core philosophy of mathematics question of whether it is invented or discovered. https://royalinstitutephilosophy.org/article/mathematics-dis...

Something can be effective, and can be unreasonably so if it's somehow unexpected, but I basically disagree that FTs or mathematics in general are unreasonably so since we have so much prior information to expect that these techniques actually are effective, almost obviously so.

I am not discussing the FT case. But as regards Wigner's article, the core thing he points out is that while we are used to the effectiveness of maths, centuries after Newton, there in fact is not any prior grounds to expect this effectiveness.

And no, this is unrelated to whether math is invented or discovered. If anything this is related to the extreme success of reductionism in physics.

As a general point of reflection: If an influential article by a smart person seems silly to you, it's good practice to entertain the question if you missed something, and to ask what others are seeing in it that you're missing.