Words&Dirt

“It happened sometimes in the practice of physics that the student, having wrestled with a recalcitrant equation, would suddenly find a way to wreak some drastic simplification upon it.  Of a sudden, two terms, which he had copied out time and again, and which had become as familiar to him as his own signature, would, through some insight, or the providence of some new scrap of information, turn out to be equal to each other, and vanish from the equation altogether, leaving a wholly new mathematical sentence to be pondered.  The student’s first reaction was exhilaration: pride at his own cleverness, mingled with a sense that at last he was getting somewhere.  But soon sobriety took over, as he pondered the remade equation and became aware that he was really just starting on a new problem.  Thus Daniel in the Black Dogg, trying to re-think all.”

––The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 542