Mathematical physics represents the purest image that the view of nature may generate in the human mind; this image presents all the character of the product of art; it begets some unity, it is true and has the quality of sublimity; this image is to physical nature what music is to the thousand noises of which the air is full...

as quoted by Ilya Prigogine in his Autobiography given at the occasion of Prigogine's 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.