"Any attempt to decipher nature and reveal its order requires certainty that the grid will not change in the course of the operation. There must be an assurance of regularity in the phenomena of nature… Otherwise there is no science.
…
[I]f a man wants to make a calculation for himself alone, he is obliged just as much to invent signs as if he wants to communicate the list of objects or the result of the calculation to someone else. Imagination exists only in so far as it can be expressed by a system of signs which it has itself devised."
François Jacob, The Logic of Life: a History of Heredity
