503 explains that he is afraid of the square root of minus one (√-1) because it is an “irrational number” (it is also, in fact, an imaginary number, but Zamyatin chose the word irrational with distinct purpose). In his Universe of the Mind, Yuri Lotman said: “Modern science from nuclear physics to linguistics sees the scientist as inside the world being described and as a part of that world. But the object and the observer are as a rule described in different languages, and consequently the problem of translation is a universal scientific task.”
