This 'n that

Psychologically, there is a difference between mathematicians and physicists, but I think it might attenuate in the following sense: Mathematicians start with axioms whose validity they don’t question. You might say it is just a game — “the great game” as Hilbert called it — which we play according to certain rules, starting with statements which we cannot analyze further. Now to some extent, I would claim that in physics the situation is inverse. Given a lot of facts, let’s call them theorems, we look for axioms, that is to say physical laws, from which they would follow.