  The human mind is endowed with innate primordial perceptions such as space,
distance, motion, change, flow of time, matter. The field of cognitive science
argues that the abstract concepts of mathematics are not Platonic, but are
built in the brain from these primordial perceptions, using what are known as
conceptual metaphors. Known cognitive mechanisms give rise to the extremely
precise and logical language of mathematics. Thus all of the vastness of
mathematics, with its beautiful theorems, is human mathematics. It resides in
the mind, and is not `out there'. Physics is an experimental science in which
results of experiments are described in terms of concrete concepts - these
concepts are also built from our primordial perceptions. The goal of
theoretical physics is to describe the experimentally observed regularity of
the physical world in an unambiguous, precise and logical manner. To do so, the
brain resorts to the well-defined abstract concepts which the mind has
metaphored from our primordial perceptions. Since both the concrete and the
abstract are derived from the primordial, the connection between physics and
mathematics is not mysterious, but natural. This connection is established in
the human brain, where a small subset of the vast human mathematics is
cognitively fitted to describe the regularity of the universe. Theoretical
physics should be thought of as a branch of mathematics, whose axioms are
motivated by observations of the physical world. We use the example of quantum
theory to demonstrate the all too human nature of the physics-mathematics
connection: it is at times frail, and imperfect. Our resistance to take this
imperfection sufficiently seriously [since no known experiment violates quantum
theory] shows the fundamental importance of experiments in physics.
