a lot of thinking, mathematics and talk.

I started off thinking that maybe the social sciences ought to have the kinds of mathematics that the natural sciences had. That works a little bit in economics because they talk about costs, prices and quantities of goods. But it doesn't work a darn for the other social sciences; you lose most of the content when you translate them to numbers.

Much public thinking follows a rut. The same thing is true in science. People get stuck and don't look in other directions.

Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.

This is a very unusual universe,

A number of my friends used to kid me about it -- 'Nice solution, but what can it do?' They didn't see much in it.