---
title: "The miraculous maths of the Universe"
date: "2026-04-28T06:00:00+01:00"
modified: "2026-04-28T11:13:29+01:00"
url: "https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/the-miraculous-maths-of-the-universe/"
post_id: 10327
---

# The miraculous maths of the Universe

![A hand writing mathematical formulas on a blackboard](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/images/vitaly-gariev-NpHSRakEYPM-unsplash.jpg)“The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe”, said Einstein, “is that it is comprehensible.” Why, for instance, are the laws of physics not so complex that they are forever beyond the grasp of a brain made of jelly and water? Not only is our Universe comprehensible, but it was possible for a man of the 17th century to discern a law that applies at all times and in all places. That is, of course, Newton’s “universal” law of gravity, which explains everything from the motion of the Moon to the tides in the oceans.

One mind-boggling proposal for why the Universe is comprehensible arises from our knowing, at least in principle, how to create a universe. Everything is believed to have begun in the unusual state of the vacuum, with the property that it “inflated” ever faster and, as it did so, created ever more of itself. This theory of “inflation” – proposed in 1979 and 1980 by Russian physicist Alexei Starobinsky and American physicist Alan Guth, respectively – has been grafted onto the basic Big Bang theory. To create a new universe, therefore, it is necessary only to recreate the conditions of inflation.

While this might be a simple idea, it is of course still way beyond our current capabilities. But not perhaps beyond those of a super-civilisation millions or billions of years more advanced. The British physicist Edward Harrison asked us to imagine that one such civilisation does this in each galaxy in the Universe: that would create trillions of baby universes, that might each spawn trillions more. If we live in such a DIY universe, the reason it is comprehensible is because it was created by comprehensible beings.

Our success in comprehending our Universe comes down to a mysterious thing. As first recognised by Galileo, the laws of nature are mathematical. As the British physicist and atheist Paul Dirac remarked, using the Creator as a metaphor: “God is a mathematician of a very high order.”

What this means is that it is possible to write down a mathematical formula that predicts things previously unsuspected and which physicists can actually find when they go out and look for them – from antimatter to the Higgs boson. This is so astonishing that physicists often cannot quite believe it. “Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough,” said the American physicist Steven Weinberg.

So why is the Universe mathematical? The Swedish-American physicist Max Tegmark believes that mathematics is physics. He envisions a multiverse of universes, in each of which a different bit of mathematics is implemented. In most universes, the mathematics is too simple to give rise to anything interesting. But in our universe, which contains a mathematical “theory of everything”, it is complex enough to spawn stars and planets … and us.

The British physicist Stephen Wolfram, however, disagrees that our Universe is mathematical. Rather, he believes physicists see only the parts of the Universe that mathematics illuminates – like a drunk at midnight looking for their dropped car keys under a streetlight, simply because that’s the only place they can look.

In the 1980s, Wolfram made the discovery that simple computer programmes, whose outputs are repeatedly fed back in as their inputs, can generate infinite complexity. It prompted him to propose that the Universe is being generated by computer programmes, which are creating everything from a rose to a baby to a spiral galaxy. To understand what most of the Universe is doing we have no choice but to run the programme. But, within the great universe-generating computation, there are places where a shortcut exists and the output can be predicted without doing so. This, says Wolfram, is mathematical physics.

No doubt Douglas Adams, who imagined the Earth as a computer run by mice to calculate the answer to the “Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything”, would be proud.

*This article is from New Humanist’s Spring 2026 edition. [Subscribe now](/subscribe).*