Einstein’s point was that physicists really had no right to expect that. The world needn’t have been orderly at all. It didn’t have to abide by laws; under other circumstances, it might have been anarchic all the way down. When a friend wrote to ask Einstein what he’d meant by the comprehensibility remark, he wrote back, “A priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way.

Einstein’s point was that physicists really had no right to expect that. The world needn’t have been orderly at all. It didn’t have to abide by laws; under other circumstances, it might have been anarchic all the way down. When a friend wrote to ask Einstein what he’d meant by the comprehensibility remark, he wrote back, “A priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way.