Quote of the Day

There’s a reason for poetry. Poetry is a very nonlinear use of language, where the meaning is more than just the sum of the parts. And science requires that it be nothing more than the sum of the parts. And just the fact that there’s stuff to explain out there that’s more than the sum of the parts means that the traditional approach, just characterizing the parts and the relations, is not going to be adequate for capturing the essence of many systems…I just like the feeling that culturally there’s going to be more of something like poetry in the future of science.

—Christopher Langton, quoted by John Horgan in The End of Science