Mathematical magic combines the beauty of mathematical structure with the entertainment value of a trick. - Martin Gardner

The deeper question that lies behind the above banalities is whether the rules of baseball are similar to or radically different from the rules of science. Clearly they are radically different. Like the rules of chess and bridge, the rules of baseball are made by humans. But the rules of science are not. They are discovered by observation, reasoning, and experiment. Newton didn’t invent his laws of gravity except in the obvious sense that he thought of them and wrote them down. Biologists didn’t “construct” the DNA helix; they observed it. The orbit of Mars is not a social construction. Einstein did not make up E=mc² the way game rules are made up. To see rules of science as similar to baseball rules, traffic rules, or fashions in dress is to make a false analogy that leads nowhere.

The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science finds only a mad, never-ending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon Particles. For a moment the waves and particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity.

The greatest scandal of the century in American psychiatry … is the growing mania among thousands of inept therapists, family counselors, and social workers for arousing false memories of childhoood sexual abuse.