The equations: icons of knowledge

For thousands of years mankind has tried to understand nature. Exploring the world on all scales with instruments of ever more ingenuity, we have been able to unravel some of the great mysteries that surround us. While collecting an overwhelming multitude of observational facts, we discovered fundamental laws that govern the structure and evolution of physical reality. We know that nature speaks to us in the language of mathematics. In this language most of our basic understanding of the physical world can be expressed in an unambiguous and concise way. The most artificial language turns out to be the most natural of all. The laws of nature correspond to equations. These equations are the icons of knowledge that mark crucial turning points in our thinking about the world we happen to live in. They form the symbolic representation of most of what we know, and as such constitute an important and robust part of our culture.