The grand book
Published
19 October 2026
“Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics.”
Why it stays with me
Galileo wrote this in The Assayer, and it is one of the founding statements of modern science. Before him, nature was mostly described in words and qualities. After him, it was measured.
Hawking and Mlodinow treat Galileo as a turning point in The Grand Design for exactly this reason: he looked for laws that could be written down and tested.
What I find beautiful is how strange the idea is when you stop to think about it. There is no obvious reason why a falling stone or a planet should obey equations. Yet they do, and that is why learning mathematics feels less like learning rules and more like learning to read.
Ayoub Khallok keeps this archive of essays, research, lessons and notes, written to understand things more clearly. More about Ayoub.
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