David

“We have figured this out, yes,” said Dimitri. “With lasers. It was very illuminating experiment.” “Was that a pun?” “It was!”
― Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

“We shall never know what Faraday would have achieved had he mastered mathematics, but, paradoxically, his ignorance may have been an advantage. It led him to derive his theories entirely from experimental observation rather than to deduce them from mathematical models. Over time, this approach gave him a deep-seated intuition into electromagnetic phenomena. It enabled him to ask questions that had not occurred to others, to devise experiments that no one else had thought of, and to see possibilities that others had missed. He thought boldly but would never commit himself to an opinion until it had withstood the most rigorous experimental testing. As he explained in a letter to Ampère: I am unfortunate in a want to mathematical knowledge and the power of entering with facility any abstract reasoning. I am obliged to feel my way by facts placed closely together.”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“I hope you theorists know what you’re doing.’ ‘I can assure you that we don’t. The geometry is still beyond us. All I learnt in the void was that our best guess so far is certainly wrong.”
― Greg Egan, Incandescence

“One should never mistake pattern … for meaning.”
― Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata