I entered the academy in order to answer a single question, and I left the academy upon finding an answer that I deemed satisfactory. Though, to tell the truth, I already knew the general shape of the answer that I wanted to find, and the only resource which the academy provided was the language necessary for transmuting these inchoate notions into a form that would be recognized as legitimate. Still, despite them being encrusted with theory after theory – reference after reference – the notions themselves didn’t change much.
For a time, I thought that this made me a charlatan instead of a scientist. Scientists, I believed, pursued knowledge for the sake of knowledge, truth for the sake of truth. Scientists, unlike me, did not invent stories to justify their preexisting notions. It was relieving, then, to discover the nonsecret that any publication seminar makes no pretense of hiding: that the creation of science is an act of storytelling as much as anything else.