Oppenheimer

By far my favourite quote from Oppenheimer was when Niels Bohr says "Algebra is like sheet music. The important thing isn't can you read music, it's can you hear it. Can you hear the music Robert ?" and then the theme plays. But obviously he isn't talking about music, if you look at the Euclidean proof for the Pythagorean theorem, it's a big jumble of syllogisms a mess that doesn't help you understand anything that's actually going on, compare it with the image proof that we've all seen and this helps you perceive and even physically feel why this is true. The reason why mathematics and science are just imperfect languages used to precisely communicate these things, great discoveries are scarcely made through means of reason. Discoveries are made through intuition and sudden grasp of ideas, physicists and mathematics seeing and feeling these relations. Nikola Tesla called instinct something that allows you to perceive truth even when logic deduction is futile. Would you rather read a sheet of music or would you rather hear it. I think the choice is clear.