Forms and cognition: the "laws of nature."

For those who felt a certain embarrassment when hear that man has discovered the "laws of nature" and that they are nothing more than mathematical formulas, whose harsh aridity often appears intuitively inadequate to play all the symphonies of the universe. The human mind goes tirelessly searching for forms. To survive in a hostile world, we have developed a sensitivity to configurations, which we use to predict what will happen.
Sometimes [...] configurations actually exist in reality and reveal important truth about the universe. We call them laws of nature. And this is what science does, bringing to light the secret configurations that make the universe. For human beings using mathematics is the most effective way to think about configurations. We therefore believe that the laws of nature are mathematical laws.

Ian Stewart - What shape is a snowflake? (translated from Italian edition).

The linear original sin.

Therefore, rather than describe the phenomena in their full complexity, the equations of classical science deal with small fluctuations, surface waves, small changes in temperature and so on. [...] This habit rooted to the point that many equations were linearized the moment they were written, so that the complete non-linear descriptions not even appeared in the scientific manuals. Consequently, most scientists and engineers came to believe that practically all natural phenomena could be described by linear equations.

Fritjof Kapra - The Web of Life.