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This essay is written to demonstrate how thoughts gradually organize themselves in my head. It will therefore proceed in something of a zigzag fashion. I ask your forgiveness if what results is more complicated than it should be. I will begin by talking about silence, a particular silence. When one cannot say or does not know how to say anything on a given topic, we know that a good rule is to keep silent. On this point, many citations can be found, from «Silence is often the best answer» to the banality at the conclusion of Wittgenstein's Tractatus (1921, 89): «What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence». I like to remember Diogenes, who- as Diogenes Laerzio (180-240 A.D.) and Sextus Empiricus (2nd century A.D.-203) recorded, and as Hegel (1833) later commented upon and Kierkegaard (1843) took up again — in facing the Eleatics, who denied movement, got up and without uttering a word, began walking. Silence, then, was the statement of a method that even today forms the foundation of scientific criticism. The issue at stake is that of the domain of application of a mode of reasoning, whether that argument has arrived at the point of formulating a physical law or whether it is only apparently indisputable, but conflicting with the perception and conclusions that one can draw from it. A statement, however, a silent one, that does not seek to deny reasoning.
Several centuries later, when Galileo Galilei, in his introduction to Il Saggiatore (1623), authoritatively formulated his second theory wherein the universe is a book written in mathematical language, he also initiated an anthropological revolution, stating that perception is not only misleading, but useless — beyond a certain level -in comprehending the universe.
Philosophy [i.e., physics] is written in this grand book — I mean the universe -which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it i