“That's just it." He laughed. "The untrained man reads a paper on natural science and thinks; 'Now why couldn't he explain this in simple language.' He can't seem to realize that what he tried to read was the simplest possible language– for that subject matter. In fact, a great deal of natural philosophy is simply a process of linguistic simplification– an effort to invent languages in which half a page of equations can express an idea which could not be stated in less than a thousand pages of so-called 'simple' language. Do I make myself clear?” -Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz














