"Imagine that the Earth were visited by a metaobserver from another world, free from the prejudices of our conceptions of science. I think his report would probably look like this:

"Science is a kind of Game. The Game has special rules which are known and clear to everybody though they have never been classified and codified. The rules have been basically constant for about 300 years. In the process of the Game, ingenious and ever more complicated theoretical structures are created, but the players do not seem to believe them absolutely. Anyway, they perceive ultimate knowledge as a delusion since only the scholar who manages to destroy what has previously been created is considered truly gifted. What is the prize in the Game? This is not quite obvious. For some, it is the ability to build a more ingenious theory; for others, and for those not directly participating in the game, it is the ability to master previously unknown powers of nature, which they unaccountably succeed in doing by proceeding from their ephemeral theories; for still others, it is the ability to get hold of something purely material. The remainder play the same Game, but they play according to quite different rules and interfere with other people. One of the principal rules seems to stipulate that the Game must not be dull. The moment it loses its acuteness, more ingenious conjectures start arising, the rules are modified, and, surprisingly, again everything is all right, though it becomes more and more difficult to play."

— “Faces of Science", V. V. Nalimov (Soviet mathematician) pp 33, ISI Press, Philadelphia, 1981