Veiled quotes

“In the grouping of phenomena it is the similarities established in the impersonal world that are regarded as of particular significance; the more obvious similarities detected by our unaided senses are held to be of minor importance.  For this reason the physicist claims that visible light and invisible ultraviolet light are kindred in nature, for both are electromagnetic vibrations.  The accidental circumstance that the human eye detects the first kind of radiation, and not the second, is viewed as unimportant.  Indeed we need no appeal to theoretical physics to find illustrations of the same tendency.  Thus if we are judging from our immediate sensations, we should presumably claim that sugar and saccharin exhibited a striking similarity, for both are white crystals and have a sweet taste.  On this basis we should be tempted to class the two substances into one family.  Yet insofar as the chemist is concerned, sugar and saccharine are entirely different:  sugar is a carbohydrate containing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen; saccharine, though sweet to the taste, has the chemical characteristics of an acid, and its molecule contains carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and also nitrogen and sulfur.  Likewise, the botanist places in the same family the potato and tomato plants, or the yellow buttercup and the hooded blue aconite.  No obvious similarities can justify such a classification.  These examples and many others that could be mentioned bring out the important point that it is not the obvious that is necessarily credited with any deep significance in science.  It is the veiled.”

--A. D’Abro, The Rise of the New Physics, Volume One (of two), pages 15-16, Dover edition 1951.  Originally published in 1939.

“Inscrutable upon a sunlit day,

Her veil will Nature never let you steal,

And what she will not to your mind reveal,

You will not wrest from her with levers and screws.”

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part One, lines 672-675, published in 1808.