Science Quote by Vannevar Bush

Bush is warning against a very American temptation: to mistake calculation for comprehension. He grants arithmetic its dignity, then politely demotes it. The line is structured like a door closing. First clause: if we confine “scientific reasoning” to tidy, formal logic, progress stalls. Second clause: the poker analogy lands the punch because poker is mathematical and still stubbornly human. Probability can tell you the odds of a flush; it cannot tell you when to bluff, when your opponent is tilting, when the table has changed. Bush is arguing that science works the same way: it’s not just solving equations, it’s choosing which equations matter, designing instruments, sensing anomalies, and making judgment calls under uncertainty.

The subtext is a defense of intuition and model-building, but not in a mystical way. Bush, an engineer and wartime science administrator, lived in the mess where theory meets hardware, budgets, deadlines, and adversaries. In that world, “pure” logic is never pure; it’s always entangled with assumptions, approximations, and the practical limits of measurement. His poker comparison smuggles in something else: science is competitive and strategic. You’re playing against nature’s hidden hand, but also against other researchers’ interpretations of it.

Context matters: Bush helped shape U.S. research policy and later championed information tools (think Memex) to extend human thought. Read here, he’s not anti-math; he’s anti-reduction. He’s insisting that the physical world isn’t impressed by our neatness, and that real understanding requires judgment, imagination, and a feel for the table.