J. W. N. Sullivan

“{{Wikipedia-inline}}”

“Science deals with but a partial aspect of reality, and...there is no faintest reason for supposing that everything science ignores is less real than what it accepts...Why is it that science forms a closed system? Why is is that the elements of reality it ignores never come in to disturb it? The reason is that all the terms of physics are defined in terms of one another. The abstractions with which physics begins are all it ever has to do with.”

“Galileo approached the modern scientific outlook more nearly than did Kepler. Like Kepler, he believed that Nature lent itself to mathematical description, but he does not seem to have regarded the fulfillment of mathematical relations as the cause of phenomena. He regarded mathematics rather as the one and only true key that would introduce order and coherence into our sense impressions.”