Mathematics and Physics

Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefor objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.

There have indeed been civilizations upon your planet that understood as well as you, and without your kind of technology, the workings of the planets, the positioning of the stars -- people who even foresaw "later" global changes. They used a mental physics. There were men before you who brought back data quite as "scientific" and pertinent. There were those who understood the "origin" of your solar system far better than you. Some of these civilizations did not need spaceships. Instead, highly trained men combining the abilities of dream-art scientists and mental physicists cooperated at journeys not only through time but through space.

I united the majority of well-informed persons into a club, which we called by the name of the Junto, and the object of which was to improve our understandings. ... The first members of our club were...
Thomas Godfrey, a self-taught mathematician, and afterwards inventor of what is now called Hadley's dial; but he had little knowledge out of his own line, and was insupportable in company, always requiring, like the majority of mathematicians that have fallen in my way, an unusual precision in everything that is said, continually contradicting, or making trifling distinctions—a sure way of defeating all the ends of conversation. He very soon left us.