David Berlinski, A Tour of the Calculus. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995, p. 305
"Having made modern mathematical science possible, no doubt the calculus made it inevitable as well. No purely physical theory has ever severed its link to the calculus nor severed its reliance on the prestidigitation that the calculus requires and embodies. But for all the power and real intellectual grandeur of contemporary scientific schemes, involved as they are in the description of strings or the cosmic inflation that took the universe from a bang to a bubble in the twinkling of an eye, the enterprise of which they are the supreme expression no longer commands wide assent as a secular faith. I say this as no mark of disrespect. It is simply a fact. There is a fissure in contemporary thought, physicists arguing that each advance brings them closer to a final theory and the rest of us observing that the difference between what has been and what needs to be accomplished remains what it has always been, which is to say infinite. The simple melancholy fact is that outside the charmed circle of those working on the current frontiers, no one believes any longer that physics or anything like physics is apt to provide contemplative human beings with a theoretical arch sustaining enough to provide a coherent system of thought and feeling.
"And yet human beings are a naturally inquisitive species, and if the questions we would ask at the very far margins of our experience--how did it begin and in what and why?--have even in the asking a hollow and self-mocking quality, as if the universe were designed to discourage such speculation, there are plenty of other questions that provoke our curiosity; and the withdrawal from the grand concerns of physical theory may well indicate as much as change in attitude and interest as an intellectual defeat.
"Biologists, for example, appear to possess what physicists now lack: a commonly agreed upon method, an accepted intellectual agenda, and a set of research problems accessible both in economic and intellectual terms. This would occasion no more than a shrug were it not for the strange fact that molecular biology is so very different a discipline than anyone might have expected. No mathematics, for one thing. Despite a few attempts by mathematicians here and there to participate in the life of the biological sciences, mathematics has played no role in molecular biology and seems destined to play none. No achievement in molecular biology requires mathematics beyond finger counting for its comprehension. But even stranger, there is this: that the thought world of molecular biology would in its major aspects be instantly comprehensible to someone who knew nothing of science, modern physics, Newton, continuity, or the calculus. Living systems may best be understood in terms of their constituents. Going down, one encounters organ systems, organs, tissues, cells, cell parts, and then on a much smaller scale of organization, molecular constituents of which the most important are the proteins and a master molecule, DNA. But there, in contrast to physics, things come to an end. In place of depth, the biologist requires intellectual extent. he or she wishes to trace connections among the biological constituents, following pathways across a living system and coming to understand how influences are transmitted.
"This is an oversimplification only in the sense that it is the details that need to be filled in. The outline is clear enough. It reveals an intellectual landscape far simpler than the one inhabited by mathematicians. Mathematical science requires theories, molecular biology, facts. As one century gives way and another comes to replace it, the very nature of science as a distinctive human activity is ineluctably changing."