CAUSES AND SYMMETRIES IN NATURAL SCIENCES. THE CONTINUUM AND THE DISCRETE IN MATHEMATICAL MODELLING1.

How do we make sense of physical phenomena? The answer is far from being univocal, particularly because the whole history of Physics has set, at the center of the intelligibility of phenomena, changing notions of cause, from Aristotle’s rich classification, to which we will return, to Galileo’s (too strong?) simplification and their modern understanding in terms of “structura