Oct 23 2009
∞
“ Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears it ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of the mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison.
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— Albert Einstein, quoted in Morris Kline, Mathematics and the Search for Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 219, seen in Roger Griffin, “‘The Rainbow Bridge’: Reflections on Interdisciplinarity in the Cybernetic Age,” Compass Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference, October 2009.
