You are talking about science and not mathematics. They are two separate things. Mathematics is used in science, but it's also used in a lot of other things too. There are many more uses for mathematics than explaining the laws of nature. More important there is plenty of mathematics out there that has no practical use whatsoever. Mathematics is not required to reflect reality in the slightest.
Mathematics was started in a prehistoric time when someone first came up with a concept for the number 2.
Mathematics is in no way bound by any type of natural laws. Euclidean geometry, for example, assumes that the world is flat! Even at its closest to science it's still an abstraction of reality. At worst it has nothing to do with the natural world whatsoever.
I had a good laugh when I read your post! Please excuse me, I am being in no way offensive.
And yet the basic thing is there. You said it:
.. there is plenty of mathematics out there that has no practical use whatsoever.
Exactly.
.. someone came up with the concept for the number two.
When I was young my wife and I had a dog and a cat. Our dog and cat thought my wife and I were one person, divided into two? They did not know we were separate entities?
Please.
What is sight, in essence? Sight is cognition.
Cognition is the basics and the origin of biological life. Later, cognition created the brain, the organ of sight.
The word sight means literally cognition. Do you SEE what I say? To see is to understand, to know.
The brain did not create cognition. What did the first cell do? It di-vided. Di < Dis > apart > a part: originating in the concept 2.
.. videre < uidere was a lost verb already at the time of the Roman Republic. The origin is the Indo-European root WID = to know > to see.
The cell does not know what it is doing when it divides? Our cognition is the cognition? Our mathematics is the mathematics? Only Homo Sapiens Sapiens can understand the concept of 2?
Dogs and cats believe their master and mistress constitute one entity?
Intelligence suddenly erupted in the human brain?
An architect or a carpenter do not need to be concerned about the curvature of the earth. It has no relevance in their little world.
The Sumerians found mathematics as a by-product of astronomy 1800 years prior to the Greeks. They invented the sun clock. They did not assume the world was flat.
Does the concrete precede the abstract?