I cannot explain it. But I think the problem he addresses may answer a question that I have had running around this brain for about 25 years.
The world expressed by the language of math always seemed somehow not quite right to me after I found out that the circumference of a circle divided by the diameter is an irrational number. Something as simple as that ratio between geometric shapes should not create something as profound as
p. I have always felt that complexity of describing the world using math was way too complicated. In engineering much of math is simply the use of tricks. tables and transforms to make the complex manageable. Perhaps it should never have been so complex to begin with.
It should be an interesting book.
"The world expressed by the language of math always seemed somehow not quite right to me after I found out that the circumference of a circle divided by the diameter is an irrational number."
I've always felt the same way. The number that did it for me was i, the square root of -1. It's called imaginary, because it can't exist in the world of real numbers and yet is critical to higher math equations. I always saw that as the chink in the armor of science.
At any rate I think Wolfram, and those mentioned by others here, have hit upon a more accurate dscription of EVERYTHING because it is non-linear. Now if they can do it in about 42 dimensions, 264 colors, and modulating terabit bandwidths they might be getting somewhere. As a start.