“Science is a game—but a game with reality, a game with sharpened knives… If a man cuts a picture carefully into 1000 pieces, you solve the puzzle when you reassemble the pieces into a picture; in the success or failure, both your intelligences compete. In the presentation of a scientific problem, the other player is the good Lord. He has not only set the problem but also has devised the rules of the game—but they are not completely known, half of them are left for you to discover or to deduce. The experiment is the tempered blade which you wield with success against the spirits of darkness—or which defeats you shamefully. The uncertainty is how many of the rules God himself has permanently ordained, and how many apparently are caused by your own mental inertia, while the solution generally becomes possible only through freedom from its limitations. This is perhaps the most exciting thing in the game. For here you strive against the imaginary boundary between yourself and the Godhead – a boundary that perhaps does not exist. You may indeed be given the freedom to unloose every bond, to make the will of Nature your own, not by breaking it or conquering it, but by willing it also.”
Erwin Schrödinger (1887 – 1961)