The advent of small, inexpensive computers with superb graphics has changed the way many sciences are practiced, and the way that all sciences presen… - John Barrow

The logic of the Greeks prevents them having the idea at all and it is to the Indian cultures that we must look to find thinkers who are comfortable with the idea that Nothing might be something.

Continual miniaturisation allows resources to be conserved, efficiency to be increased, pollution to be reduced, and the remarkable flexibilities of the quantum world to be tapped. Very advanced civilizations elsewhere in the universe may have been forced to follow the same technological path. Their nano-scale space probes, their atomic-scale machines and nano-computers, would be imperceptible to our coarse-grained surveys of the universe. ...This may be the low-impact evolutionary path you need to follow in order to survive into the far, far future.

A less inflexible picture of mathematics is one that focuses on the fact that it is an open-ended human activity. Inventionism is the belief that mathematics is nothing more than what mathematicians do. ...We invent mathematics; we do not discover it. ...The independent discovery of the same mathematical theorems by different mathematicians from totally different economic, cultural, and political backgrounds—often at widely separated times in history—argues against such a simple view. The inventionist could respond by pointing to the universality of human languages. ...One might expect that those aspects of this universal grammar that share features of logic, and hence counting, would also make counting appear instinctive. In fact, although simple counting... is fairly universal in ancient and primitive cultures, virtually none of them went on to carry out mathematical operations more sophisticated than counting. This suggests that these higher mathematical operations are not genetically programmed into the human brain... They are more likely to be by-products of multi-purpose pattern-recognition capabilities.