ABSTRACT
Yet in the case of algebra, it is a matter of something completely different. If the algebra of physicists produces the same effects as profundity, it is only because it is completely flat; the dimension of thought is absent from it. Indeed some critics, on the strength of the author's scientific renown, have believed that they saw a profound thought in this book; they offered some quotations in support of their judgement, and these quotations were commonplaces of a rare platitudinousness. It shows clearly that Planck was not a great mind. Men made of flesh, on this earth, probably cannot have a representation of truth that would not be defective; but they need one; an imperfect image of unrepresentable truth that the authors have seen, as Plato says, on the other side of the sky.
