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“Then there is the extraordinary marriage of observation and mathematics. Mankind, and for some perhaps sociological reason it has been mostly man kind, has developed a sinewy language of the utmost rigour and austerity that has proved to be the perfect tool for teasing out objectively the consequences of an imaginative qualitative leap or of adding spine to a whim so that it can stand up to the harshness of quantitative comparison of prediction with observation. I hasten to add that mathematics does not appear explicitly in this book, but it does lie as a hidden deep foundation beneath it.” — Peter Atkins
Then there is the extraordinary marriage of observation and mathematics. Mankind, and for some perhaps sociological reason it has been mostly man kind, has developed a sinewy language of the utmost rigour and austerity that has proved to be the perfect tool for teasing out objectively the consequences of an imaginative qualitative leap or of adding spine to a whim so that it can stand up to the harshness of quantitative comparison of prediction with observation. I hasten to add that mathematics does not appear explicitly in this book, but it does lie as a hidden deep foundation beneath it.