“Once accepted, once taught, science is cold. Cold like the techniques that result from it. Cold like the manuals that describe its content or the books that tell its history. But science-in-the-making has two aspects. One could call them daytime science and nighttime science. Daytime science involves reasoning that is articulated like gears, and results that have the force of certainty. One admires its majestic order like that of a painting by Vinci or a Bach fugue. One wanders there as in a French garden. Conscious of its own gait, proud of its past, sure of its future, daytime science advances in light and glory.

Nighttime science, on the contrary, wanders blindly. It hesitates, stumbles, retreats, sweats, wakes up with a start. Doubting everything, it searches for its feet, questions itself, and corrects itself again and again. It is a sort of workshop of the possible where what will become the material of science is put together. Where hypotheses remain in the form of vague presentiments, hazy sensations. Where phenomena are still nothing but solitary events with no link between them. Where experiment projects have barely taken shape. Where thoughts wander through sinuous paths, tortuous alleys, more often than not, with no way out. At the mercy of chance, the mind twists and turns in a maze, under a flood of messages, in search of a sign, a glance, an unforeseen connection. Like a prisoner in their cell, it goes round in circles, looking for an exit, a glimmer. Restless, it goes from hope to disappointment, from exaltation to melancholy. There is no evidence to say that nighttime science will ever turn into daylight science. That the prisoner will come out of the shadows. If it happens, it happens by chance, as a sudden whim, a spontaneous generation. Anything, anytime, like lightning. What then guides the mind is not logic. It’s instinct, intuition. It’s the need to see clearly. It’s the relentlessness of living. In the endless inner dialogue, among the innumerable suppositions, approaches, combinations, associations that incessantly cross the mind, a line of fire sometimes tears the darkness. It illuminates the landscape with a blinding, terrifying light, that is stronger than a thousand suns. The first shock is followed by a harsh struggle with thought habits. A conflict with the universe of concept that regulates our reasoning. Nothing yet allows to tell whether the new hypothesis will surpass its coarse primeval draft form. If it will refine itself, perfect itself. If it will stand the test of logic. If it will be admitted into science of the day. “