[lisper]

> How is it that we can find an unfathomably small sub-set of possible symbols--a mere 26!--that are capable of encoding any idea whatsoever?

That's not an equivalent question. Any repertoire of N distinguishable symbols for N>1 is essentially equivalent.

But there's no reason a priori to believe that the laws of physics should be modellable with mathematics at all, let alone that we should be able to figure out what those mathematics are, let alone that they should turn out to be simple enough that the model (or at least a very significant chunk of it) can fit in a single human brain.

Consider dreaming: when you are in a dream state you are living in essentially a solipsistic world where science doesn't work. There's no inherent reason why that could not be totality of your existence. It's just an accident of biology that you wake up occasionally and get to experience the "real" world, which we consider "real" because it seems to behave according to mathematical laws. The existence of such experience is not a given.