In religious texts, on the one hand, “wisdom” tended toward the mystical. In science, on the other hand, “wisdom” remained connected to knowledge of nature, but with the advent of idealizations such as the frictionless surface and the perfect vacuum, science, too, adopted a paradoxically otherworldly ideal of how we come to know nature: through mental constructions that are more intellectually tractable than material reality, hence amenable to mathematical representation.
