What I understood, and he may have understood, was...

“What I understood, and he may have understood, was that the “new physics” was a mockery of the whole Cartesian, Newtonian edifice of knowledge that both he and I had grown up with, in which one thing inexorably leads to another and nothing is going to leap out and poke you in the eye. If the behavior of the smallest particles was indeterminable, then, in some way that he would also have to admit, everything else was up for grabs too. You could spend your whole life making precise measurements, plugging them into equations, repeating experiments, and never for one moment letting your mind drift toward the unseeable and incommunicable. You could be the most sober, straight-arrow scientist in the world, utterly intent on your work and immune to religion or fiction or whimsy—and still, what you’d finally see at the bottom of it all, in the highest-resolution photomicrograph or telescopic image, was a grinning monkey face staring back at you, the face of your own incurable ignorance, if you like, or the face of something infinitely”