The laws of physics appear to follow a mysterious mathematical pattern

A strange pattern running through the equations of physics may reveal something fundamental about the universe or could be a sign that human brains are biased to ignore more complex explanations of reality – or both.

This insight comes from a physicist’s version of Zipf’s law, an observation by linguists that the most common word in a language appears twice as often as the second most common word, three times as often as the third, and so on. In…